I have been trying to figure out what I need and want to do for personal projects in 2017.  Frankly it is a tricky exercise because I always derail my train of thought with little ohs and ahs.  Here is a list of things I have planned…

Categorize and Track Articles

This almost seems like a simple to do list.  I need to be able to save an article and categorize it so I can review it later.  When I read it, I would like to be able to mark it as read, rate it and file it away for future reference.  I used to us del.icio.us but it lacks some of these features.

TODO List

This seems simple enough, a honey do list.  My Wife needs to be able to put items on a list for me and I need to be able to mark them as done.  It would be nice if it could be marked as in progress and blocked, with notes about what is going on.  She wants to stick a due date on it so things get done before her Mother comes to town.  Not so simple after all… authentication, authorization, workflow….  

Update The HTML and Layout of My Website

Well, this is a loaded statement.  The reality is the code behind is also a mess from tinkering and it is 10 years old now.  Parts of it cross several layers incorrectly and …ugh what was I thinking compiling views into the assembly.  The whole system needs to be re-worked and I’d like to clean it up so the different parts can be added via Nuget so I can reuse them in other projects as well as letting some of my friends use them.  Yeah… it seems like a few people want something without all of the complexity of some of the bigger CMS systems.  So it might be time to rewrite it and release it as a 1.0…. hmmm.

Nuget

I do not really want to release everything to the whole world on the main Nuget feeds.  But I wouldn’t mind setting up my own feed and pushing packages to it.

RSS Feed reader

I miss google reader.  I really do.  It made things easier.  I want a simple feed reader that you can mark items in the feed as read.  Add more feeds.  See the basic information, and configure how often it should poll each feed for changes.  I want it to track items even if they fall off the feed and I want it to be able to generate a pdf/ePub of the item (or items) for offline use.

Source Control

I’ve been managing with Memory sticks and SD cards forever and a day or with a git repo store on a remote cloud drive.  Ok, not the most useful or elegant solutions but it has worked so far.  But I’d like to get a real source control solution.  TFS would address several of my concerns but I didn’t much care for TFS.

Build Server

I need a build server.  TFS, Bamboo, Jenkins, Teamcity….something…  When I check in my code I want it build.  Things that I setup as Nuget packages I’d like auto pushed into my Nuget feed.  It almost sounds like I want a whole CI cycle/sdlc…

Virtual Machines

So many servers, so little hardware.  Well…I have lots of old hardware.  But I would love to have several virtual machines to run it all on one box.  I’ve had a few ideas thrown at me, Neverware, cloudReady, HyperV, Virtual Box, and CloneZilla.  I don’t much about any of them nor their fitness for what I need and want.  I have two different cases in mind.  The first is having several several virtual servers running on physical box.  The other is related to guests. For example - when my Mother-in-law comes to visit she uses my Wife’s computer.  She plays Facebook games, visits yahoo news and a ton of other sites.  Many have ad providers that do not do a very good job of blocking malware content distribution.

And as a result I end up rebuilding my Wife’s computer.  I have noticed that my kids also end up needing their PC rebuilt from time to time.  I’d like to stand up a VM for them and if they wreck it, meh, blew it away a standup a new VM from  an image.

Deployment Server

I’ve been using Octopus Deployment Server at work to push code to the Dev, QA, Stage and Production environments.  There are still some unanswered question around SQL updates and the like.  But it has proven to be extremely useful and I would like some sort of solution here.  I would like something that can support deployments using an agent and FTP.  My sites host is not going to let me put an agent on a shared server.  nope nope.

Tracking Ideas, features and requirements.  Turning them into projects/products

The more I think about this, the more it sounds like Jira.  But it also sounds like an extension/expansion of the TODO program above.  I could Use TFS for this, but it might be make a good project to tinker with;  After all, it would be nice to have something built around a SDLC, project management and requirement tracking that didn’t start out as a bug tracker with bits shoe horned in.  I do like the Atlassian tooling, but the way their UI works sometimes is a bit of a trick.  I am not a huge fan of TFS.

VOIP Phone

I have some old android smart phones that I would like to root and connect to a VOIP phone system.  So I need to do a little research on a VoIP phone system and get something setup.

The Wife’s Projects

My wife has a few development related projects for me.  Mostly standing up content managed websites for her and friends.  But they all tie back to projects I’ve already listed.

Requirements

With the exception of the Virtual Machines I want

Feel free to watch for posts about these projects and more over the next few months. 

Hmmm that’s not a big list…