• Worth Doing Poorly; How I Failed To Run An Event (And What I Learned)

    30 min reading time; ~6300 words Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly… because doing it poorly is better than not doing it. — redheadhatchet This quote is one I read on Tumblr a few years ago, immediately printed out, and taped to my wall (imperfectly of course, as you can see from the image to the right). It’s based on a quote by G. K. Chesterton, a philosopher from the early 20th century, who said “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” Honestly, I like the updated version better. Finding the quote finally put words to a driving force…

  • An App From Scratch: Part 6 – Creating DB Tables (US1-C1)

    9 minute reading time; ~1780 words Greetings! Now that we’ve done our planning, we’re at the part where the rubber meets the road. In this post (and the next few), we’re going to implement the actual cards that we’ve put together. Along with walking through how to execute the card, we’re also going to cover the branching and pull request processes, to give you an idea of the mechanics of getting code from our own system into the production codebase. While these posts are more technical in nature, I’m going to explain what I’m doing, so that anyone can follow…

  • An App From Scratch: Part 5 – Development Planning

    17 minute reading time; ~3200 words Greetings! So far in this series, we’ve taken our project from a single idea all the way to a design of the system needed to support it. Here, we’ll take that system design and plan out the work needed to breathe life into it. Development planning is all about breaking the system design into workable pieces. This includes estimating how long they might take to build and in what order, and creating a roadmap to complete our project. In this post, we’re going to talk about how to break down technical tasks into specific…

  • An App From Scratch: Part 4 – System Design

    10 minute reading time; ~1840 words Greetings! By the time we got to the end of our last post, we had: Today, we’re going to transition into technical work and start developing our system design. This work will lay the foundation for understanding how everything fits together and translates into an actual app. If you haven’t read the previous posts, I’d suggest you start at An App From Scratch: Part 1 – What To Build. You can also find all the related documents and code here: Building Tailgunner. System Design If this project has been well-run, there’s already been a…

  • An App From Scratch: Part 3 – Workflows

    8 minute reading time; ~1460 words Hello there! Today’s post is taking our requirements and starting to talk about workflows. If you haven’t read the previous posts, I’d suggest you start at An App From Scratch: Part 1 – What To Build. You can also find all the related documents and code here: Building Tailgunner. Workflows In our last post, we refined our user stories with the use of wireframes. Taking that one step further, we’re going to take one of our user stories and pull out all the workflows that the story is trying to get done, either explicitly…

  • An App From Scratch: Part 2 – Wireframing Requirements

    7 minute reading time; ~1325 words Welcome back! Today, we’re going to talk about wireframing from our requirements and stories, and exploring how talking through a wireframe helps us refine our specifications. Between the last post and this one, I’ve taken the requirements and user stories that we wrote about, and cleaned them up into a project plan. The documentation is still light, and that’s intentional, as we’re focusing on a very narrow scope of work; we want to get the basic template management and editing up and running first. By the end of this post, we will have some…