For the last three or four weeks, I’ve been coding away feverishly. This, by itself, is notable. I haven’t had the energy or the mental focus to work on any project like this for so long in a very long time. It’s been exciting and fulfilling to finally feel like I’ve reconnected with a part of myself that’s been missing for so long. I’ve also been doing some writing again, micro-fiction of course, but I’ve done more writing since the first of the year than I think I’ve done in the last couple of years combined. And it’s the writing that’s led directly into the coding.
Back in the days when Ficly was still in business, I’d wanted to help contribute to that site’s code base. The site’s owner was the original developer of Ficlets, which was, in turn, owned by AOL. And when AOL effectively all but went the way of the dodo, Kevin migrated Ficlets into the daughter site Ficly. I wasn’t fortunate enough to learn about Ficlets until far too late, but I was an active member of Ficly for a number of years. I wrote quite a few stories during my tenure there, including some really fun collaborative series with a couple of other users.
Active development and maintenance of the site was slim, unfortunately, and for good reason. Kevin had a job, family, and other life responsibilities, and I think Ficly ultimately got relegated to a hobby project and a labor of love for him over time. As a result the code base became somewhat stagnant and outdated, as the Ruby on Rails framework it was built on moved forward and left our little realm of micro-fiction behind. I’d offered at one point to help contribute to the site’s development, knowing I’d have to learn Rails in order to do so. But I ran into technical difficulties setting up a development environment at home, due in no small part to the fact that several of the packages that powered Ficly no longer existed. So the result was that Kevin opted to shutter the site rather than bringing the code up to spec, which would involve basically rebuilding the site from the ground up.
And so we as a community were forced to move on.
There were several of us from that community who made attempts to work up replacements. The one that got off the ground fastest and most completely was Ficlatte. A handful of us from the Ficly community migrated there, but since its inception, Ficlatte has been more of a shell of Ficly. It’s had the basic tools to write stories and interact marginally with other users, but many of the key features that Ficly a community have been missing.
Until recently.
I haven’t particularly enjoyed being unemployed for the better part of a year, but one of the advantages I’ve discovered is that right now I have the opportunity to add to my knowledge and programming skillset. Ficlatte is built on Python and Django. Both are frameworks that would be useful for me to be familiar with, and so a few weeks ago I offered to contribute to Ficlatte’s development and thereby enhance my own skillset.
I’ve plunged in with both feet. Writing code these last three or four weeks has become almost a kind of addiction for me. It’s filled almost all of my free time, supplanting even most of the other hobbies I’ve engaged in the last few months to deal with my anxiety. I’ve always found it thrilling to put together strings of code and watch them come together to do something useful and practical.
I’ve come to love this little community of micro-authors, so it gives me great pleasure to be able to add to the site in this way while developing some new skills that make me more marketable as I search for work.
As always, if you like to write — or think you might like to write — I highly encourage you to visit Ficlatte and check out our little community. All the stories are short, so there’s no pressure to jump straight into writing long fiction. And we now have a development team actively working on new features, so the site is about to change for the better in the coming days.
