I’ve been spending a lot of time lately working on personal projects, and I honestly feel like it’s been time well spent.

It’s like, I go to work, code for some amount of hours, and then on the bus ride home I code some more. My eyeballs strain, my hands grow weak with each passing keystroke, My retinas burn…

…with passion. A passion that will probably lead me to eyeglasses before I hit thirty. Oh the joy.

I recently discovered Microjs, a website display-case of ‘micro-sized’ libraries that each do one thing really well, and are, well, micro. Believe me when I say that the project is very serious about the term ‘micro’. Your library is considered ‘micro’ if it’s under 5kb. Meaning if you clock in at 7kb minified, sorry, you aren’t cut out for that micro life.

I thought it was really cool! I hadn’t seen a site like this, and it just looked like a lot of fun. It’s interesting to see what programmers have built in under 5kb of code. There are some incredibly popular libraries like functional.js, respond.js and mustache.js. there are some hard hitters on this list, alongside some nerf-bat grade hitters and some straight-up pillows.

“This is a pillow fight I want to be a part of… I thought to myself in different words before I actually came up with that metaphor.

Enter is.js!

I was thinking of ideas for a potential project that I could make micro. Fortunately around this time I ran into is.js, which is a ‘micro check library’ made by Aras Atasaygin, and I was a fan! but suddenly my own opinions jumped to the forefront and I started restructuring the way I would want to implement a check library. Is.js clocked in at just over 6kb, so I thought I would take the reins, attempt to keep most of the functionality while keeping it MICRO.

And so, check.js was born!

It’s an interesting challenge to keep something micro, in fact, I’m not really done with optimizing the size of this thing. It’s an ongoing project, but feel free to take a look! JUDGE ME. I CAN HANDLE IT.

I think the dream is to shrink it down to a manageable size (3kb or less is ideal) and then finally add it to Microjs!

If, as a developer, you’re looking for a project to work on, take a look at Microjs. Find something you like, or something you think you could write better, optimize, or test, and then fork it on github! I think that programs that are less than 5kb are easy to understand and develop additional features for. At the end of it, you’re going to have some sort of sweet github project that you can tell people about!

If you feel so inclined, I encourage you to work on check.js! …which is just a clever way for me to say WORK. WORK YOU FOOLS. WORK ON THE THINGS I’M WORKING ON SO I DON’T HAVE TO WORK AS HARD. but OF COURSE I’m going to masquerade it like “YES. IT’S FOR THE GREATER GOOD OF OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE…

It’s totally for the greater good of open-source software, c’mon!

Open source is a serious boon if you like to learn by doing. Get at it! Start learning! START DOING!