The backend of my application is complete! And with that, the whole application is done! (ish)
Why do I say ish? Becuase, its time to move out of the initial build phase, and into deployment. This is an exciting milestone, but its a hard one for me to jump into becuase there’s so many things that I’d still like to do on the application. For example, I’d like to add more fleshed out user settings, you can’t delete an old roast from the frontend of the application yet, error messages to the user are practically nonexistent.
It’s rough, but its important to ship. Why? So that I have a usable product, one that can be iterated on! Even for a personal project, its important to think this way.
Creating a Minium Viable Product
This is something that businessmen and women know well in product development. When you have a great idea for any kind of product, you have to often cut many of the features that you were most excited about in favor of shipping something, to see if there's even a desire for the product.
When I set out to build this project a few weeks ago, I wrote down some of the things that I wanted this app to do.
- Let a user sign in and out
- Store roasts according to the user that roasted them
- Track the times of roasts and present the information to look back at
As you work, the scope naturally begins to widen. This is normal if you’re working on something that you’re actually excited about. And I am! Trust me. I want to create graphs of first crack times, ways to export your roasts to share them with others, ways to see roasts that other people have created. And yes, animations, error messages, and user settings.
Don't Let Perfect Stand in the Way of Usable
The fact of the matter is, the app is stable and allows me to start tracking my roasts! Once I get this hosted, it’s a complete product that I can start using to roast my coffee! And actually save my data!
Am I done? No way!
I’m going to add all the UX features that I mentioned above and more. But, I can slow down a bit, use the app, feel the pain points in it and actually make the iterations that are meaningful in slow versions!
So, What's Next?
In my experience, deployment is always much more complicated than I plan it out to be, so I’m expecting that I will be working on it for a few days. Once I have a solution, I’ll be posting about it!
As for the blog. If you’ve been following along with my build of this application, thank you! It means a ton. Keep your eye out for the fully deployed application to so that you can try it for yourself! I’ll be slowing down on posts for the application though. I’m no longer in a dead heat to develop the application!
If you enjoyed the ride, drop me a line in the comments and let me know!
Now its time to begin the battle with AWS…
Check Out the Project
If you want to keep up with the changes, fork and run locally, or even suggest code changes, here’s a link to the GitHub repo!
https://github.com/nmiller15/roast
The frontend application is currently deployed on Netlify! If you want to mess around with some features and see it in action, view it on a mobile device below.
https://knowyourhomeroast.netlify.app
Note: This deployment has no backend api, so accounts and roasts are not actually saved anywhere between sessions.
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