Even coding can be distracting
Tags: watercooler, devjournal
Published: 2021-03-07 13:45:09

---
title: Even coding can be distracting
published: true
description: 
tags: #watercooler #devjournal
//cover_image: https://direct_url_to_image.jpg
canonical_url: https://reaper.im/blog/20210300-Why-do-I-end-up-re-designing-everythi
---
> This is a mirror post from [reaper.im/blog](https://reaper.im/blog/20210300-Why-do-I-end-up-re-designing-everythi)


I've done this quite a few times when it comes to implementing minimal design across tools and apps that I build.
So in [this post](https://reaper.im/blog/20210305-UI-Overhaul) I talked about why I re-designed the todo app, when all I wanted to do was a add a filtering functionality but then I redesigned the whole thing.

And technically, the idea for the colors was taken from the UI i was writing for the [markdown editor](https://mark.reaper.im) which then ended up being the inspiration for me to modify the UI of [commitlog-web](https://commitlog-web.herokuapp.com) through which I created a small library called [themer](https://themer.reaper.im) and now I'm sitting here writing this post indirectly back linking to everything I've created in the past 1.5 days just because I liked the input style I made for a markdown editor.

And this has happened before, I got inspired by [lancerlist.co](https://lancerlist.co/) and ended up cloning that color scheme to all the apps I built that week/month. 

From memory, I probably built a css resets library that cloned the color scheme of lancerlist and maybe a dummy hiring network and a covid tracker that probably doesn't work anymore.

I know it's not bad to do make something look good.  
**but!** then I think that I do end up spending a lot of time doing this re-design and making things look clean than actually working on something meaningful that'd help a lot of people instead of just building stuff that I'd use, though none of them were ever launched or promoted as products / tools for the greater good so maybe I'm to blame for that.

Like, I could write a  new [repl.it](https://repl.it/) clone that didn't need you to sign up and create a new repl and then get to coding but just open a url and boom, a repl to test snippets on, but then obviously the other guys wants to make a living out of it so I can't blame him but nope, I'm going to write a dark mode setup library (cause there's not enough of them already)

I mean, I learn a lot while building these smaller tools and apps but then it's not something I can go to the market with or actually earn from it. Obviously there are developers like [Sindre](https://github.com/sindresorhus) and [Drew Devault](https://drewdevault.com/) that actually make a living out of open source projects , both with totally different methods but both are full time open source developers.

Argh, Offtopic!

I was talking about building useful stuff for people to use, that reminds me [commitlog](https://github.com/barelyhuman/commitlog) reached about 48 stars at the time of writing this, so that's really nice but let's see if I can build a lot more tools that work well in everyone's workflow. 

I want to try writing a bundler for once, the existing ones are good but then they all assume the developer workflow a lot. Other than webpack and rollup, which are really extensible and hence people create wrappers around them. Anyway, I need to know what would be a better idea ? An online instant repl environment or a bundler?

I guess you can mail in the answer, but for now.  
**Adios!**