I hav
e a coworker who loves to code. He has a list of technologies that he’s been just hoping to find a problem for. Angular, Xamarin, WebAPI, all kinds of stuff.
I do have such a list; for me, they include things like Angular and Erlang. I also have a separate list of projects that I would like to code (or have coded someday), problems that need to be solved. In the past, I would start to work on one of these projects.. get 2-3 hours in, realize that the full solution is more like 50-60 hours away.. promise myself to work on it the next weekend.. and then life moves on, something else comes up, the need is just not that great, and it doesn’t get done.
// TODO: separate blog post on obsolescence
Synergy is Born
At the end of a BrainNom Monday (where we sit around and watch instructional videos on the web or delve into new subjects as a group of software engineers), I mentioned some of these side projects I had never gotten around to.
He got pretty excited. I have given him a reasonable target to try to hit with this array of tools he’s been sharpening. So we started a collaboration.
The Experiment
I’m taking on the role of product manager – dealing with what the app should do.. how it handles multiple people.. the user experience … sharing .. stuff like that. And he’s pursuing the coding.
He gives me feedback on the requirements; I give him feedback on the technology.
And we’re starting to build this app!
He has laid out the project structure, which includes a bunch of words I had not heard of before.. Ionic, Cordova, Ripple. He showed them to me today. I have a bunch of requirements and data structures and use cases and build orders of features figured out – keeping an eye out for what’s the shortest path to get to a minimum viable product, but to have enough foundational UI that the future features have a place to sit without a UI (and UX) rewrite.
The App
Will be revealed in due time. Either it will go live, and then we’ll have a whole series of blog posts of how we got there (with full source disclosed), or it won’t, in which case we’ll blog about the demise. I could give you a technically truthful teaser and say it has to do with temperature and burning, but I’d be trying to throw you off-course, of course.
I think we should come up with a cool code-name for this app, so I can talk about the app without actually giving it away. Hmm.
