This weekend I dove into a side project that I conceived of over Thanksgiving. The goal is to explore the Twitter API, and figure out a way to find interesting new people to follow on Twitter. I probably spent 20 hours coding and got really really into it. I have the app up to the point where a user can authenticate with their twitter account, and all of the twitter accounts they follow are saved in the database. This is basically all the set up needed to start actually do something interesting with the data - which I'm looking forward to doing later.
The really cool part though, is that all of the code I wrote is high quality, production level code. I test-drove the development, and have full unit testing in the app at this point. This means that when I 'finish' the project and launch it, I'll be confident enough that there won't be many bugs, and the bugs that do crop up will be fairly easy to fix.
I'm also really glad that I spent time coding my own project - something that I haven't done much of in the past few months. It's really satisfying building something for yourself, and it's a great learning opportunities. I solidified a lot of concepts that I was previously unclear on, learned a few new tricks, and had a lot of fun. Overall, this was awesome, and I hope I continue working on this project, and others in the future.