Advent of Code, Day 1: Picking a Project

I’ve wanted to do Advent of Code for a few years, but I just can’t get excited about random puzzles. Not knocking all the folks involved in it–more power to you! It just isn’t for me. So I haven’t participated.

Last week while flipping through a seed catalog to figure out what I’m going to plan in my garden next year, I had an idea: I want to build a plant starting/harvesting calendar for my garden. Building that will be my own Advent of Code project this year.

Today was Day 1, planning day.

Name

Plant Gantt. Amanda came up with it and it is perfect. A gantt chart for plants.

Goals

Build an interactive planting/harvesting calendar for vegetables.

Deploy my own Ember app with a user login system on something like EmberFire

Beef up on my D3 and Ember skills.

Use Tailwind for the first time

Make progress every day.

Features

Ability to add a plant name, seed start date, days to maturity, and pick a label color for it.

Visualize the plant’s growing period on a 52 week calendar

See the current day marked across the full calendar

Ability to hover over a plant and see how long it has been growing and how long left until harvest

Ability to create an account and save your calendar

Ability to print the calendar you created

Ability to create multiple calendars with unique names

I may not get this done in 25 days, but I intend to make progress every day. It will be tough with the month ahead: Two out of state trips, moving into our new house, and holiday parties. I’ll carve out time every day to get some work done, though.

Today’s progress

Picked a name and got a domain

Planned out the features and my goals for the project

Set up the git repo and basic Ember app

Install add-ons: ember-d3, ember-cli-tailwind

Tomorrow’s goal

Figure out the basics of the D3 gantt-style chart