Tag Archive for "austin" | Nicole Pank: geek, nerd, front end developer, punk rock girl.
Posted on Monday, October 21st, 2013 at 11:40 am.
Much like our app, this story is by no means complete. But, I promised a post, and today is my only day off this week, so today is when I’m writing it.
On Friday night, before the hackathon even started, the guys and I got together to whiteboard some ideas about the way our project would work. Before things devolved into a case of “these folks should not be allowed to have markers,” we actually did get a nice plan together. We even got a start on planning our UI/UX.
Saturday morning, our teacher Matt delivered an awesomely helpful talk to the class about creating “personas and user stories” as a way to plan out an app. It’s important to think about not just who will use your app, but also just what each might do with it and how they’ll feel about it while they use it.
After spending an hour talking about this, creating a handful of personas and stories for each of them as they navigated through our app, it became apparent that 1, the scope of our MVP was too wide, and 2, we were pointed in the wrong direction anyway. By pivoting our plan, we were able to get started on something that will be far more useful to the users we’d most like to get and retain.
I didn’t count the authentication-related tables there, by the way, because I’m still working on all of that. Last night when we presented the current state of our project to our classmates, I was grumbly because I had to take a break from learning about using OAuth to allow our users to log in to our app with their Facebook accounts.
In any case, after the presentations, I was pretty much done. “Nope, sorry, can’t brain anymore, I’m all out for the day.” So, it was time to party at the DevHouse for a bit. I got tired early and was about to head home, but Nick ended up convincing me to stay out for a little bit longer and we spent the next couple of hours at pretty much my favorite bar in Austin.
Which brings us to today. My only day off this week, and my first in over two weeks (Justin and I spent all of last weekend coding too, trying to make sure we were up to speed on ActiveRecord::Associations… if only we knew then what these last couple of days would hold). This will be the last thing I do on my computer all day. Tomorrow, I’m back to work, but the only things I plan on looking at on a glowing screen today are cartoons.
If you’re interested in following our progress as Justin and Nick and I work on this final project over the next few weeks, feel free to watch our GitHub repo.