Hi! I did this post..
..and I think I used the wrong tags, do you think you folks could help me out with understanding the path from idea to production like I'm five.
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Top comments (7)
Hey Daniel!
From your other post, it seems like your comfortable with the technical aspects of bringing something to production (type code, shovel code onto the Internet) but are struggling with the time and attention management side of your side project.
As a serial/parallel "prod-crastinator", I feel your pain. I have all these ideas for products, things to design and build and so on and so forth. I get excited, start typing into the magic code box and then lose interest some number of hours, days, weeks, months, or (sometimes!) minutes later.
The thing that helped me the most was reading Weinberg on Writing. In it, Jerry Weinberg, one of the most prolific technical authors of our generation breaks down how he goes about "shipping" so much. My main takeaways were:
Hopefully this helps! Happy to answer follow up questions as well if this isn't what you're looking for!
I'll check out the book. That some really great advice by the way. I'm trying to find some fellow travellers as you said because I think I can't be accountable to myself yet. It's something I'm working on though. That was something I had no idea I needed. Although, I also wanted some technical help or advice specifically on things to look out for when deploying a project. Like you said, I can code and all that but what next? CI/CD? Maintenance? I'm completely blank
Hey Daniel,
Gotcha! I can provide a bit more help (I hope!)
Getting the app into other peoples hands requires you to get your app hosted on a service such as Google Cloud Compute, Heroku, Now, Amazon Web Services, or something else.
At the end of the day, the question I always want answered by my hosting provider for hobby-projects that I want people to use is is "How much of my time and attention will be spent wrangling the hosting and networking infrastructure?" Each of the above referenced deployment platforms have different answers for that depending on the resources the app needs.
There's a lot to be said for CI and Continuous Deployment, but I wouldn't place that on the critical path to getting your app into production. Ensuring your app is maintainable is another really deep and complex topic that also shouldn't get in the way of getting your app into the hands of users. If you really want to dive into that, there's a few things to think about:
Maintainable software is all about cost of change vs frequency of change. An app that requires very little changes beyond security patches has different maintenance needs than an app that is going through frequent updates in attempts to find product/market fit. I don't know if I've ever seen a set of strategies or tactics that are appropriate in every single situation, but here is what I would suggest in most cases:
These end-to-end tests that are executed through the user-interface are often very slow and can be fragile, unfortunately. So as your applications feature set expands and as the details become more nuanced, you may want to consider writing a suite of not-end-to-end-through-the-ui tests. For node and react and vue, the jest suite of tools is pretty accessible and easy of use. For ruby, I like rspec. I am not plugged-in enough in other languages to make concrete recommendations for them, however.
At the end of the day, maintainability is about understanding the risks to users and your business associated with making changes; and then taking steps to mitigate those risks. There are two books which I would recommend skimming or reading that help identify the risk areas and provide tangible tactics for uncovering and then mitigating those risks.
The first is lessons learned in software testing this is an oldie-but-a-goodie that I recommend all programmers read at least once. The second is agile testing, which provides a more team-oriented approach; and provides an alternative perspective that I found quite useful to balance out the slightly more dogmatic perspective from Lessons Learned in Software Testing.
I hope this is a bit more in line with what you're looking for!
Zee
P.s. I don't know if this platform supports direct messages, but if you want an invite to the afore-mentioned community of solo/small-group non-vc backed entrepreneurs send me a DM with your email either here or on the twitters.
Hi, first of all, thank you so much for all the gems you dropped and all the time you took out to clearly explain everything. Things are getting less and less cloudy and I can see what the way forward is and what decisions I'll have to make going forward. Never heard on Now, looks like pretty nice.
Also, thanks for the insight on testing and CI, its something I've never done. Really nice boiled down explanation.
I have DM'ed you about the Slack channel. Seems like a really cool community.
One thing I always do prior to beginning to code is the "Rubber Duck" method. Basically you speak to the duck, carefully explaining every single detail of your project. Each step, each bit of logic, how you will organize it into code and what order it will go in your workflow. Gives me great clarity.
This is awesome! I feel like I've been really missing out on conceptualizing everything and getting a clear image of what I'm actually building and what will be needed. I'm copying the "Rubber Duck" method :D
Great news!!