Devlog

These are my daily notes and internal conversations during development. They may be helpful to understand the larger context of decisions that were made, and how I learned and explored while building.

Devlog < 2023 < February < 13

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More thinking on this as I run into limitations. I would like to be able to “template a template”, as in, create a template for a set of blocks for a type of output (like a dev log), and then generate a new set of blocks with some input. The pain points I have now are that every item in a group/sequence (like a dev log) has a ton of boilerplate, and the boilerplate is very similar and conceptually easy to parameterize. But since the similarity is in the template and not the content, I can’t actually template that. What is the nature of this problem?

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An idea came to me while thinking this over: what if instead of just exporting a file, you could export a block itself? Since it’s possible to escape the block commands, we could actually render a template of a template, all we would need to do is tell the parser to treat the output of a “block export” as an input to the block parser. This might be really quick to implement too…

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This worked out pretty great, actually. All I had to do was add a new “block export” command, and recursively feed all the block exports through the renderer, and then back into the block parser. Now I can generate (and then use) templates at render time.

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