Man, sometimes you just get an idea stuck in your head, right? For me, it was this mess of trying to keep track of all my gadgets and what I loaned out to folks. Spreadsheets? Nah, too clunky. Whiteboards? Erasures happen. So, I figured, why not try to build something super basic myself? That’s where this whole thing started, me wanting to make a simple little web tool, just for myself, to log my stuff. And the whole time, I was just scribbling everything down, trying to keep a record of what I was even doing.
I kicked it off by just grabbing some basic stuff. I already had a text editor on my computer, you know, for writing anything. So, I opened that up and just started typing out what I remembered from old school, which was mostly just HTML. I wanted a simple page, a title, a place to put some lists. It wasn’t pretty, just a blank white screen with some black text. But it was a start. I would just save this file and then open it in my browser to see what happened. That’s how I began, just pushing bits of text around.
Right off the bat, I ran into bumps. I’d type something, save it, open it, and it just wouldn’t look right. Or I’d forget a little symbol, and the whole thing would get messed up. It felt like I was constantly going back and forth, typing a little, checking a little. My first few pages were just a jumble. I quickly realized I needed some kind of structure. That’s when I dug out an old notebook, one of those cheap spiral ones. I started writing down the things that kept failing. Like, “forgot to close this tag,” or “this button doesn’t do anything.” It was a mess of notes, but it was my mess.
Then I decided it needed to look better. Black text on white was just sad. So, I started messing with CSS. That was a whole new beast. Trying to make things line up, choosing colors, figuring out how to make buttons look like buttons instead of just weird text. I’d try one color, hate it, try another. I kept notes on what colors I tried and why I dumped them. I even sketched out rough designs in my notebook, just with a pen, drawing boxes and arrows for where things should go. It was all about trial and error, seeing what worked and what just looked awful.
The core of this whole thing, for me, was actually getting something to do something. That’s where I dipped my toes into JavaScript. I wanted to add an item to a list, press a button, and have it appear on the page. Boy, was that tricky. My first attempts were just sad. The button would do nothing. Or it would add ten items at once. I remember spending a whole evening just trying to get one single item to show up when I clicked. Every time it failed, I wrote down what I had typed, and then what error message I saw. It was a painstaking process, almost like decoding a secret language.
My notebook became my best friend during this phase. I wasn’t writing elegant documentation, not at all. I was just jotting down:
- What I was trying to achieve that day.
- The code snippet that wasn’t working.
- The exact error message I got.
- My best guess at what went wrong.
- Any fixes I tried and whether they worked.
Sometimes, I’d just write out entire lines of code by hand, trying to spot a mistake. It felt really basic, but it helped me track my thinking, especially when I’d leave the project for a day or two and come back totally lost.
Mid-project, I wanted to save the items I added. Just refreshing the page and losing everything was super frustrating. This meant trying to figure out how to keep data, even if it was just locally. I stumbled upon something called local storage. That sounded like a mouthful, but it was essentially just letting the browser remember stuff. Getting that to work was another mountain to climb. I had to learn new commands, new ways of thinking about how information gets stored and retrieved. Again, my notebook filled up with attempts, failures, and eventually, the commands that finally made it stick. I’d write “YES! This worked!” next to a line of code, almost like a little victory flag.
The big breakthrough moment was when I finally had a working local inventory tracker. I could type in an item, click “add,” and it would show up. Then I could close the browser, open it again, and my items were still there. Man, that felt good. It wasn’t fancy. There were no pictures, no slick animations. Just text in a list. But it was my text, and my list, and it worked because I built it. It wasn’t perfect, but it served its purpose of organizing my stuff. And every step, every frustration, every small win, was there in that messy notebook.
Looking back, the actual tool was simple. But the process of building it, and more importantly, just writing down every single thing I tried, failed at, and eventually got right, that was the real learning. It wasn’t about perfect code; it was about the journey of figuring things out and having a record of that journey. It really taught me that even the roughest notes can be super valuable when you’re just trying to make something work.
