The idea
In 2019, by the time I finished my coding bootcamp, I’d been into personal finance for a few years (hint hint: it’s what made me switch to software engineering.) When I finished my coding bootcamp, which had deferred tuition, I built a salary simulator spreadsheet to help figure out what salary to ask for in my first dev job.
A classmate was interested, so I anonymized it and made a sort of template for my classmates - my career counselor continued to share it with graduating classes after mine.
But then, I had a great idea – why not make it into a React app? Which I did, but then I broke it trying to refactor or fix a bug, I can’t remember, so at some point, I took the deployed app down.
I remembered Salary-Sim a couple of weeks ago, and I think it is a useful resource, so I’m reviving it, this time in Svelte! I just like Svelte and how minimalistic it feels. And since I’m a front-end simplist, I like that it lets me pretend I’m just writing HTML.
Check it out
Making it
This site was my second venture into Svelte. I’m still discovering it as I’m going.
Some highlights:
- I found out about stores halfway through, so I’d been using my own sort-of “state” before and had the pleasure of refactoring that to use a store. Very pleasing.
- For data vis, I contemplated using D3.JS, but the overlap with Svelte is minimal, and also, it felt overengineered. I also considered Florence, but ended up settling on making my own SVGs based on the Svelte examples. It could definitely be a lot fancier, but I’m actually pretty happy! I’d thought it’d be a lot more difficult than this.
- This was also my first time using Vite! Setting up the boilerplate from the CLI was delightful. I loved the cute little colors. I’m still a little unclear how exactly it’s doing what it does, but I didn’t need to find out during this project, which is exactly what I need from a boilerplate. Be pretty and stay out of the way.
- oh, and this is my first subdomain on this site! It was really easy to set up. I’m thinking of making subdomains for more of my projects. Maybe it’ll finally stop me from buying domains I’ll never use.
Next steps
I want to improve the UX to make this more “delightful” to use. While I find the minimalist CSS really satisfying on this text-based site, I think it’s a little sad on salary-sim. Some animations would make it cuter. I’m a little ashamed that I made such a boring site for such a fascinating topic – but it’s an improvement from the spreadsheet… I think?