Alright, let’s talk about this thing I’ve been fiddling with, I’ve just been calling it ‘coore’ in my head. It wasn’t some grand plan, really. It started, like lots of things do, out of sheer annoyance.
I found myself juggling a bunch of little scripts and text files for managing some personal project configurations. You know the drill, one file for this setting, another for that list, maybe a third one tracking some simple state. It was getting messy. I tried a few existing tools, but they always felt like overkill, too complicated for what I needed. Bloated. I just wanted the core stuff handled simply. So, I thought, why not try and build a tiny little thing myself?
Getting Started
So, one weekend, I just sat down and started sketching out what I actually needed. Didn’t even touch the keyboard much at first, just pen and paper. What were the absolute essentials? Reading some values, writing some values, maybe keeping a small log. Super basic.
Then I actually started coding. Didn’t reach for any fancy frameworks. Just plain old Python, trying to keep it as straightforward as possible. My first attempt was clumsy. Really clumsy. It technically worked, but the code felt awkward. I spent a good few hours just trying to read a simple structured file properly and kept running into silly little edge cases. You know, like forgetting about empty lines or comments.
Hitting a Snag (and pushing through)
I almost ditched the whole idea right there. Thought maybe I was just wasting my time, maybe those complex tools were complex for a reason. But then I remembered this project I worked on years ago. We spent months building this incredibly complex configuration system. It could do everything! Except be understood or easily modified by anyone new. It became this big scary monster nobody wanted to touch. That memory kind of spurred me on. Simplicity, I told myself. Stick to the absolute minimum.
So I ripped out a bunch of the code I’d written. Started again, focusing purely on the reading and writing of simple key-value pairs. No nesting, no fancy types. Just strings. It felt almost too simple. But it worked reliably. Adding the logging part was easier after that.
- First, got the basic file reading working.
- Then, added the writing part, making sure it didn’t mess up the file.
- Finally, tacked on a simple function to append log messages.
Where it Ended Up
So now I have this little ‘coore’ utility. It’s not much. It doesn’t have a fancy interface, just command-line. It only handles the specific format I decided on. It probably wouldn’t scale for a team or a huge application. But for my personal projects? It’s perfect. It does exactly what I need, nothing more. It replaced three or four little scripts and a messy folder structure.
It’s become this quiet little helper that sits in the background. The whole process was a good reminder, honestly. Sometimes the best solution isn’t the most powerful one, but the one that fits the actual need without fuss. We get so caught up in features and possibilities, we forget about just making something solid and understandable. This ‘coore’ thing, it’s solid for me. And that’s enough.
