Alright, let’s talk about this “angela minimah” thing I spent some time on recently. It wasn’t some big official project, more like a personal itch I needed to scratch. I kept seeing folks talk about stripping things down, going super minimal, and I thought, okay, let’s give this a whirl myself. See what the fuss is about.
So, first thing I did was clear out my usual workspace. Digitally speaking, I mean. Got rid of all the fancy tools, the complex setups I usually rely on. Just a basic text editor, a simple compiler, nothing else. The idea, or what I understood of “angela minimah”, was about constraints breeding creativity, right? Or at least forcing you to think differently.
I decided to build a tiny little utility. Something really simple, like a task tracker but barebones. No GUI, no database, just command line and maybe saving to a plain text file. Simplicity itself, or so I thought.
Getting Started Felt Weird
Honestly, the first few hours were just… awkward. I kept reaching for shortcuts or tools that weren’t there. It felt like trying to type with mittens on. My usual flow was completely disrupted. I spent more time figuring out how to do basic stuff the “minimah” way than actually coding.
- Compiling took extra steps.
- Debugging was back to basics, lots of print statements. Remember those?
- Managing even simple state felt clumsy without my usual frameworks.
It was a real pain in the neck, gotta say. Made me appreciate the tools I normally use. You know, you get comfortable. Too comfortable, maybe. That was probably the point of this whole exercise.
Pushing Through the Annoyance
There was this one bit, handling user input safely. Without the usual libraries doing the heavy lifting, I really had to think about edge cases. Empty inputs, weird characters, stuff you take for granted. I cobbled together some basic checks. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked. Mostly.
Why was I even doing this? Well, work had been kinda slow. Lots of meetings, planning, not much actual doing. You know how it gets. I needed something hands-on, something to remind myself I could still build stuff from the ground up, even if it felt like using stone tools. It was either this or reorganizing my garage again, and I really didn’t want to face that box of old cables.
So I kept plugging away at this tiny tracker. Added a function to add tasks, one to list them, one to mark them done. All interacting with a simple `.txt` file. It was slow going. Every little feature felt like a major victory.
What Came Out Of It
In the end, did I create a masterpiece? Absolutely not. The final utility was clunky, barely functional compared to polished apps. But that wasn’t really the point, was it?
What I did get was a refresher. A reminder of the fundamentals. It forced me to understand what those fancy tools are actually doing underneath. And yeah, maybe there’s some value in constraints. It definitely made me think more deliberately about every single line of code.
Would I work like this all the time? No chance. It’s inefficient for anything complex. But as an exercise? Yeah, it was… interesting. A bit frustrating, but interesting. Gave me a new appreciation for the tools we have, while also reminding me not to depend on them blindly. So, that was my little adventure with the “angela minimah” idea. Glad I tried it, also glad it’s over.
