Building my app in public day 001

·

4 min read

I've had the idea for my app back in may of 2020. But I postponed it several times for a lot of reasons. Yesterday I stumbled upon the #100DaysOfTechStartup on twitter as I saw a tweet by Tech Hustler and I decided it was a good way to motivate myself. Even though I am a bit scared to built in public, I want to go with it.

So today marks day 1 of my 100 days challenge.

14. January 2021

The product

You probably have heard of apps like bring or out of milk. Since I moved in with my girlfriend I had the need of sharing a shopping list. But I often found myself buying stuff which I still had at home or forgetting to buy some items, which I needed for dishes I had planned of the week. I could not find an app that would satisfy my needs, so I decided to build something myself. Also yesterday I finally decided for a name for the app. I will post about it in a few days, when I have a landing page ready, so you can sign up for a newsletter, if you are interested.

The Stack

I've gone through multiple iterations for the frontend stack. It started out as a simple react app. Since I still work with a legacy AngularJS codebase in my day job, I don't have much experience with react, so after learning more, I decided to start over and add Redux and built with typescript from the beginning. Then i started to experiment with react native, and finally settled for a react native app built on ignite and expo.

The backend will be a standard REST Api build on node.js Either express or fastify. The data is be stored in a mongo database. There will also be a socket implementation based upon socket.io. Like the frontend the backend will also use typescript of course.

For the mockups I use Adobe XD since I am familiar with it from using it in my day job. The backend will be deployed in docker containers on a virtual server I rent from strato.

What's next?

As the challenge suggests I will post some mock ups for the app soon, go more into detail on functionality and have a landing page ready, where you get all the information about the app and will have the possibility to subscribe to a newsletter, to be told, when the closed beta starts.

I can't wait to be finally able to use the product myself and receive feedback from people. Want to follow my journey? Then follow me here or on my twitter @natension

I'm looking forward to your comments! If you have any ideas, tips, or just want to say hi, feel free, to do so here or on my twitter!

Let's build something awesome!

Nathan H.