Hey there! I finally got to wrapping up v1.0 of the Glide. Check out this commit and the subsequent 5 commits to see all the changes that have been made since the last log, mainly implementing the protocol I developed for the application, and ironing out some bug fixes. One of the more frustrating one’s was figuring out that the "\u{xx}" escape character used hex numbers, instead of decimal lol. I ended up switching everything to Vec<u8>, in the end, instead of having to deal with the annoyance of working with converting everything to and from Strings.
All in all, it was super satisfying to wrap up v1.0 for the project. I’m super excited to get into newer projects now.
What did I learn?
Well, I learnt an awful lot about TCP and TCP streams, file chunking and transferring, and even some basic networking protocols. I also learnt to structure my code better, and future-proofing everything so that I can get a smoother experience in the long run. And documenting everything with these logs and git commits really helped me get back on track every time I took a break.
At the beginning of the project I used AI tools like ChatGPT to research topics and correct my code and it went well for the first day, but that’s about where all the fun ended. It kept giving me outdated information or just straight up lies about questions that I had, and all the “code corrections” it did only introduced more bugs into my program. So I ended up ditching it early on and relied on good old Google for all my clarifications. But I am proud to say that the code, the ideas, the problem solving and the protocol I implemented have all been my own hard work.
What’s next for Glide?
I don’t plan on ditching Glide altogether. I will work on it here and there in the future. Some things I’m really looking forward to implementing is a better front end with crossterm, or even maybe a web-based front end? And for the back end, I want to make the connections peer-to-peer as per the initial idea, and allow for versatile usage, including maybe an option to chat. I also want to add compression and encryption as those are topics that I love and have been looking for an excuse to implement somewhere.
So that’s it! Thank you for coming with me on this journey to create Glide, and as always, I’ll see you on the next one.