A few days ago, I was working on Sails then it occurred to me: "How can I improve my experience when working with Sails?"

I pondered this thought for quite some time because I am passionate about Sails and I love the experience it brings. "How can I write more code without having to remember much of these syntaxes?", I asked myself.

I am a fan of doing much with less effort, so I had to think about how I don't have to repeat myself every time I want to query a user from the database. That was when the idea clicked.

Birthing the idea

I got out my pen and paper, writing down some of the repetitive syntaxes I don't want to use much of my cognitive energy to remember (yeah, I can be that lazy). After writing a few, I started thinking of how someone else could remind me of these things when I needed to make use of them. This gave birth to MantaSails.

The decision

The next stage was battling the thoughts in my mind to not build the idea. I said to myself, "Wait, really? After thinking and writing some stuff down, you don't want to do it anymore?".

I had to go back to two notes I took down when I had a brief chat with the lead maintainer of Sails, Kelvin O. Omereshone. These were the two main points I took away:

"If nobody uses the product I build, I will use it myself and also use it for any of my clients if necessary."

"Don't get stuck in analysis paralysis, take ruthless actions."

Without further delay, I decided to start working on the idea without worrying about the little knowledge I had or if anyone would use what I built.

Implementing the idea

Before getting started, I had to see what it was like to build a VSCode snippet extension. I watched about two videos on YouTube and went straight to the documentation to do some reading.

I also checked if there was any existing snippet extension for Sails, and I found this. Which also helped in building MantaSails.

I just had the feeling of building something smart enough to give you snippets of code so you don't have to bother remembering the syntax.

How did I get the name? Since I was going for 'smart', and of course, I was building for Sails, I wanted to come up with an ocean-themed name. I had to find out the smartest aquatic animals, and then I stumbled upon 'manta rays'. I think you get the point from here.

Publishing

Yes! I finally finished building my idea; it felt so amazing, and then the boring part hit me. What was it? Writing the readme file.

I found it boring because I had to create a table, gather all the snippets, and add them individually to the table. I almost wanted to procrastinate on this part, but then I remembered:

"The longer you take, the less confident you become."

I decided to get on with it as soon as I could. It took some time to finish up the readme file, and then came another challenge! Publishing the extension.

It was my first time doing this, and I didn't know my way around this process. I went back and forth looking for resources. I found myself in that zone when it feels like the error you are facing has not been solved yet, but we all know that can be false.

I was finally able to figure it out and understand the process after many hours of tilling. Then I pushed MantaSails out into the public.

Onward

MantaSails is an extension that will help you when working with Sails. There will be more updates coming soon to keep it alive and healthy for the ecosystem.

A big achievement after publishing was that the Lead maintainer of Sails featured the extension in his live stream, and this felt amazing.

I look forward to doing more and giving my best to the Sails ecosystem, because I love the brilliance behind it, thanks to Mike McNeil, CEO of Fleet.

You can connect with me on Twitter and share this article. Also, check out the repo; do feel generous enough to give it a star.

Until next time, remember ...

"Start and improve, you won't be good now but you will be good later." - Kelvin O. Omereshone