(Original commit: https://github.com/royalsflush/breakpoint/commit/a3455aebd66c2da8bffcbcc30acb2e657f192cd2#diff-b335630551682c19a781afebcf4d07bf978fb1f8ac04c6bf87428ed5106870f5)

Breakpoint

This is a blog, but it’s not a tutorial, it’s not packed with answers, it’s just a journal-type blog. I want to register my own journey through learning some of these technologies. I want someone’s experience when reading the blog to be following the journey as well.

High level concepts

At its heart, this is a blog. However, as I have described, I want it to read a lot more like a messy journey of exploration than something that you just consult when you’re not sure how to solve that particular LeetCode problem, or how to model your database for a particular functionality.

I have two concepts that I want to initially focus for Breakpoint:

  • Learning DAGs
  • Tag forests

Let me go over my conceptual idea of each.

Learning DAGs

This is supposed to be a story. An initial article is going to kick off a particular theme, and I expect that I’ll be referencing it in other articles related to the same topic. So naturally, they form a DAG. I would like for readers be able to see the latest updated DAGs.

Tag forests

Blogs need to be filtered by tags, but I’m also pretty interested in a couple of things:

  1. Can I plot all the articles in my blog and see how the tags cluster?
  2. How do the learning DAGs relate to tagging? Is there going to be a lot of overlap?

Maybe this one is just a fancy visualisation of the blog itself…

I still think that the concept of tags is useful and interesting. Perhaps we want to search for a tag (or an adjacent concept) and get the relevant of each of the learning DAGs? Okay, so I think now I have a good idea of what I want to be doing, let me do a brief roadmap

Roadmap

Milestone zero: MVP

  • MVP is just a blog, no fanciness. In particular, I want:
    • A Jekyll powered blog that is in this GitHub repo
    • It’s published to GitHub pages
    • It uses breakpoint.royalsflush.com
    • It has a first post detailing the intention of the blog and mulling over some of what I already mentioned here – I think that, for maximum historic coolness, I think I want a frozen version of this README. That seems pretty neat.

Milestone half: Google analytics

  • TL;DR: I want to have analytics for my blog. I don’t think those will amount to anything exciting, but I still want them.
  • Then I want some blog posts. I’m still finishing my minesweeper project, I think that’s the perfect candidate for my second learning DAG (the first being breakpoint itself). The reason I’m gonna defer structuring the learning DAG idea is because I need to understand a bit more about how posts are even going to be structured, and what makes sense.
  • I’ll add manual tags to the blog posts for now
  • When I finish minesweeper (see the milestones in https://github.com/royalsflush/minesweeper), I’ll go over the posts for that, and any other content I have produced in the meantime and try to distill the data model for learning DAGs. I’m pretty sure we’re going to have an N:N relationship for both learning DAGs and tags

Milestone one: Initial learning DAGs in the home page

For this milestone, I want to define better:

  1. What are learning DAGs? Sure, they’re graphs, but how do I want the experience for the reader to be? Should they suggest an order of posts that goes through a particular project? Perhaps a technology?
  2. Are those manually curated, or are they auto-generated? I can see that I might want to make the first learning DAG manually curated. That’s a good fit for projects, but I think I also want to have an arc for the technologies (React? Express? Node? Etc etc), and for areas (system design? Frontend? Languages?). I think it’s an interesting experience, but it’s definitely a challenge to structure the story.
  3. How is that going to appear? I think I want a 3D render of the DAG, like a Metroidvania level. I don’t know, that sounds pretty cool.
  4. I think when you click on it, you probably want the flattened graph, with the title of the DAG at the top, then each vertex has a header (the title of the post itself) and a summary of the article (potentially AI generated? Why not?)

Edit: I think I settled on (1) – I want projects, technologies and topic (which is a broader categorisation).