SO-overflow induced passivity - how to cope?
- by Ruben
After not really working on my pet project for a while, I discovered Stackoverflow and upon perusing it more intensely I was quite amazed.
I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so when I found eye-openers here highlighting many of the mistakes I made, I first wanted to fix everything.
However, it's a pet project for a reason: I'm self-taught and I'm studying psychology, so programming skills can never become priority one (though it often helps, even in this field).
Issues that stuck out were
numerous security issues (e.g. CSRF-prevention and bcrypt eluded me)
not object-oriented (at least the PHP part, the JS-part mostly is)
no PHP framework used, so many of my DIY takes on commonly-tackled components (auth, ...) are either bad or inefficient
really poor MySQL usage (no prepared statements, mysql extension, heard about setting proper indices two days ago)
using mootools even though JQuery seems to be fashionable, so there's more probably always going to be better integration with services I'd like to use (like google visualization)
So, my SO-induced frenzy turned into passivity. I can't do it all (soon) in the rather small amount of spare time I can spend on working on my project.
I can leave some of the issues be in good conscience (speed stuff: an unfinished & unpublished project will never become popular, right?).
No clear conscience without good security though and if I don't use a framework for auth and other complex stuff I'll regret having to do it myself.
One obvious answer would probably be going open-source, but I think the project would need to become more impressive before others would commit to it. I can't afford to employ someone either.
I do think the project deserves being worked on, though. How should I tackle it anyway? What's the best practice for little-practice people?
