Introduction
I’ve started building my first open source project back in November 2017. I actually thought to write it for fun, I didn’t know that I’ll be extending this idea, It was supposed to be a 30 min project. But many ideas came to my mind and this is how it’s started. Also, Pixi (this is how I named it) was a closed-source at first.
Heavy Squares.
When I was learning Microsoft’s GUI Framework called WPF I decided to make a very simple program to color pixels on click. Yes. Something very similar to MS Paint, but on a smaller scale, like a 3×3 grid. This idea came to me when I was reading about rectangles from WPF’s toolbox. Young stupid me thought “What if I’ll connect 9 rectangles and color them on click”. I quickly started to construct my brilliant idea. It was working. I can even say, that it was working perfectly. But don’t forget that it was just 9 rectangles. I saw potential in this project, so I started expanding it. This is when It’s getting funny, when canvas with squares began to be bigger (1024×1024 for instance) program was eating resources like stupid. A huge amount of ram (about 3 GB) just to create a 1024×1024 grid with squares. And of course, the code was messy too.
Refactoring
I started having troubles in understanding what was going on in the code. It was caused by my unconcern. Quality of code caused my fear to do any changes, so I stopped working on Pixi for half a year. After that time I got motivated again, and I started refactoring the code. In fact it wasn’t refactoring, it was rewriting program from scratch. I took me about a month to finish rewriting it, I’ll write more about refactoring in other post.
Current state
After successful refactoring, I decided to publish PixiEditor to github. You can contribute, download and modify the code. First usable version is available on releases page. Stay tuned!
Chris Code 