Pleck’s Mart is still in development.

Oh, I know, I’ve been remiss in posting updates or, to be blunt, in actually writing code for the game, but that doesn’t mean I’ve completely shelved it.

First, it was summer, and the project was always a kind of too-cold-to-be-outside winter project for me to poke away at.

Second, I’ve had some contract work that involves a lot of development work so my coding brain has been fatigued in a way that is hard to articulate.

Third, when I’ve been coding for fun I’ve been working on another little non-game project: a custom CMS.

Oh, I can hear you groaning. Just what the internet needs—another custom CMS system.

But the truth is that coding practice is coding practice, and writing a CMS is a great little intermediary coding project to practice all sorts of hard coding skills: database design, interface design, security, and conditional logic for a start. But it also is a way to curate some softer skills around code management, feature creep, usability, and quality assurance.

I mean, it’s unlikely I’ll ever do much to release this besides perhaps making the repo public at some point, but this little CMS I built started out life as a tool for myself to post social media-like content on a self-hosted website without the pressures of “engagement” getting in the way. I started using the very early version as a kind of mobile-focused travel blog back in 2022 on a trip to New York, the posts resembling nothing more than an old school Instagram: a photo and some text and some metadata.

In the intervening years I’ve added more features, but mostly as a way to enhance the original vision of the tool: incorporating code to detect and better display panoramic photos, the ability to attach an audio clip to a post (think photo of Disneyland with a minute of ambient sound recorded while walking through the Small World queue) or a robust hashtagging system that allows me to essentially categorize and create photo collections on the fly.

I’ve learned a ton building it and maintaining it, even just for my own personal use.

And having spent a dozen free hours this past week adding some geo-linked features to the administration panel, fine tuning my security, tweaking some display quirks, and generally doing some code maintenance, it continues to teach me new lessons about developing software and writing code that I am 100% certain will translate back into writing better game code when I finally settle into my winter game design routines.

Hobby projects can be a route towards experience that many professionals overlook. Sure, you went to school to learn something or you got on the job training at something else, but until you do it for yourself and become the primary problem solver for a project—be that coding, woodworking, cooking, or any other profession-meets-hobby—you are always just part of the job, and are missing out on build some skill that you might not even realize was there waiting to be learned.

It doesn’t need to be a CMS, obviously. Just what the internet needs, after all, another CMS. But making something for yourself is a great skill-building distraction for anyone.