I have set up forgejo, which is a fork of gitea. It's a git forge, but its ticketing system is quite good.

One suggestion - if you get 10 plain black t-shirts, then implement your style!

I am a dev who was focused on design and ux early on (this has changed as the needs of my work changed).

@abhideckert's suggestion on how to analyze the needs is great. Now on to the implementation.

Similarly to development, you start out with some requirements - you need to show an input box, a history of inputs, and a sidebar with categories. You work out the layout (with wireframes, pencil drawings, etc.). Then comes visual style, which I guess is the thing you struggle with?

In both layout and visual style, you need to apply design principles, but ultimately the goal is to guide the visitor's eye to the right places. This is where rhythm, repetition and contrast play a role. Basically highlight important elements, make the order of elements logical and not boring, avoid large empty areas but leave sufficient "breathing room" between elements, etc.

For visual style, you should make your own "style guide" that you apply to all personal projects. You can vary it a bit for each, if you are worried about them looking the same. Make that into a css file with a dummy html page to test. Add an input box, a textarea, select, unordered lists, etc. and style all of them to your liking. This guide will capture a lot of visual ideas, colors, spacing, which you can paste straight into your project. Do not sweat too much about stealing other people's ideas - it's an intrinsic property of art, and anyway it will probably not look 100% the same even if you copy it.

Edit: PS: spend some time just looking at the design and thinking.

I think IS are not too much into music, on the whole.

Thanks for the insight

Not exactly the question you were asking, but there are also SDKs for closed source software. You can get a library, or just an interface definition you adapt to. It can be frustrating when you cannot peek a layer deeper into the system, and takes head banging, but it's a thing. Often, if you are a significant enough client, you can get consulting or guidance from the devs at the other end.

Nowadays a lot more business software is open source (at least partially), because it increases adoption. People found that when you remove the stops, others will flock and build stuff around.

Great answer. I am also a fresh "lead" and am struggling with some aspects, but as you said, clarifying the direction and working together are the most important ones. Pairing also allows you to explain things in more depth, which aids understanding.

We don't do complex planning, usually have a few meetings and we start prototyping. So that's been a non-issue luckily as a lead. Detailed estimation can be really exhausting and takes a toll on the team.

Another cool thing I realized - you avoid the chance of some framework updating under you and breaking everything. It's a bit like pdf, it gets fixed and generally untouched.

A generator can help if you have a bunch of data that you need to convert to some html structure. I know what you are saying though, as little complexity as we can get away with, innit :)

It does look pretty damn cool. One thing that bothers me is it is in the npm ecoystem :)

My kids (4 and 8) love stardew valley. Also it works on every device. Been considering don't starve for a while. Will check if valheim fits the bill, thanks.

The lite is a tablet, which might be perfect for me, as I often work on remote machines anyway. Framework seemed pricier to me with some nice extras... but I didn't really get well acquainted. If it doesn't pan out I'd look into framework.

Ordered the starlite a couple of weeks ago, can't wait to test it out! delivery times are quite long, so gotta hold my breath