Last night I finished a project I’ve been working on in my spare time. It’s a web app where you can set up a group of messages, and get one of those messages texted to you at scheduled times. I use it to remind myself of things that are important but I tend to forget throughout the day.
While at work, I might get “Writes lots of tests” or “Go for short walks”. Every night at 11, my phone buzzes with “Get lots of sleep”. I wrote it as a script about a month ago, and have found it surprisingly valuable. Now I’ve finished a web app so other people can use it too.
Lessons learned:
I’m finally decent at estimating time for projects. I can do that by breaking it into the smallest pieces I can, remembering the longest it’s taken me to do that sort of task (not the shortest) and then doubling it (to account for missed stuff). That seems to be about right.
Writing an MVP script for myself was huge. I did that in about 3 hours and this project has taken more like 50. Having something useful already was very motivating and I learned a lot over the month. I hardcoded everything (the schedule, the text, my phone number) into that first script just to get something working. I was able to reuse the shuffling code, so it wasn’t totally scrapped.
Stack
Python 3 (Used pipenv for the first time and I’d highly recommend it)
Django 1.11
Postgres
Bootstrap
jQuery
Providers
Hosting: Heroku
Code: GitHub
DNS: EasyDNS
Bug Reporting: Sentry
Texting: Twilio
Bootstrap Theme: Lumen by Bootswatch
Home image: MockuPhone
So, give it a try and let me know how you like it!
While at work, I might get “Writes lots of tests” or “Go for short walks”. Every night at 11, my phone buzzes with “Get lots of sleep”. I wrote it as a script about a month ago, and have found it surprisingly valuable. Now I’ve finished a web app so other people can use it too.
Lessons learned:
I’m finally decent at estimating time for projects. I can do that by breaking it into the smallest pieces I can, remembering the longest it’s taken me to do that sort of task (not the shortest) and then doubling it (to account for missed stuff). That seems to be about right.
Writing an MVP script for myself was huge. I did that in about 3 hours and this project has taken more like 50. Having something useful already was very motivating and I learned a lot over the month. I hardcoded everything (the schedule, the text, my phone number) into that first script just to get something working. I was able to reuse the shuffling code, so it wasn’t totally scrapped.
Stack
Python 3 (Used pipenv for the first time and I’d highly recommend it)
Django 1.11
Postgres
Bootstrap
jQuery
Providers
Hosting: Heroku
Code: GitHub
DNS: EasyDNS
Bug Reporting: Sentry
Texting: Twilio
Bootstrap Theme: Lumen by Bootswatch
Home image: MockuPhone
So, give it a try and let me know how you like it!
https://www.solitext.com/