Building Zone4.me

Finally I have finished another side project. I wrote a post earlier about follow through - and while I have lived up to it, as this is the first project I've worked on since then, it definitely took longer than expected.

Indecision

The reason is mostly due backpedaling when the project was already half complete. You see, I initially started the project using NextJs. But right before starting on the project, I had been using Astro to make this blog, and had such a great time that I wanted to use the framework again. So a little over half way into the project, I scratched it and started over in Astro. After getting back up to about the point I was with my initial Next project, I realized that Astro might not be the best tool for the task. It felt very unwieldy to battle with Astro's island architecture to make what I was trying to make. So after a while I cut my losses and once again went back to Next.

But that was a while ago. The project still chugged along at an incredibly slow pace. Mostly due to being busy with other things and lack of motivation. It's not that I had dumped the project and started on something else. No, I was just not spending as much of my free time programming. But I was adamant that I would not quit. I was going to launch it. Because in the end I was making this for myself. I wanted a product like this.

What is Zone4

The purpose of Zone4 is to let people who work remotely to find places to work from in their current location. Workspaces are shown on a map, and when you click into a specific workspace, you get details about the workspace such if there's power plugs to charge your devices, if there's Wi-Fi, how spacious it is, is there food service etc. Other users can also leave extra information on the page that they feel might be valuable to visitors.

While building the site, I had discovered that there was already something like this out there, namely workfrom.co, but this site seemed a bit outdated and abandoned, so I decided to carry on building Zone4.

Conclusion

I am quite happy with the result. I decided to learn the UI library shadcn for this project, and I'm quite satisfied with how easy it was to use. I also got to play around with leaflet, openstreetmap and mapbox, which are technologies I've never used before.

I intend to keep slowly adding features and updating Zone4, as I intend to use it myself while I'm working from somewhere else than home or my office. But I am also eager to try something different. For my next project, I'm considering exploring something outside of the frontend / full-stack web-world. I've been looking to learn Go, so I might try to find an excuse to use it.