2 weeks ago I decided to try and build the android app. After a week of long nights, I had not gotten very far. I had a couple of really polished and great looking pages, but no real functionality had been completed and that was really discouraging after the amount of work I put into it. On the 16th, I had accidentally deleted all the work I had done up to that point because I didn't backup the data, set up a repository on Github or any good practices (yes, I know it was stupid).
At that point, I was almost discouraged enough to give up and stick to what I know best (Django, Python, and web services). Then I got yet another email requesting a mobile app. I replied back that the android app would be launched in 7 days. From that moment on I was determined to meet that deadline.
I figured I would need a whole day getting launch assets ready and deploy my first android app, so that gave me 6 days total to write all the code that would include: registration, logging in, viewing upcoming trailers, creating reminder, editing reminders, deleting reminder, push notification, etc... It was a daunting task and I knew from experience I just needed to start knocking stuff off the list quickly. Pick one and finish it as quickly as possible.
It is now 1 week later and I have completed v1.0 of the app. The MVP (minimum viable product) is not pretty, not smooth, not intuitive, very buggy, BUT it does work (most the time). After having completed the app in one week, I feel much more confidant that the problems will be solved in the coming week or two. The most important thing to me was that I did meet my deadline that I set, which as many of you know is very hard to do when developing software.
I accomplished my goal within the deadline I set. The app was created on a platform I had next to no experience on (2 weeks experience total). If I can create an app in 7 days with little experience than I would love to see what you guys can create in 7 days. Why not give it a try?
Some important things to keep in mind when faced with a mammoth project/task:
- Break it down into small steps.
- Get it to work first! It can be pretty, clever and bug free later.
- Set a deadline and keep it.
- Tell other people your deadline. The thought of letting other people down will motivate you.
P.S. The android developer documentation is great. Incredibly well put together and any spare time I had was spent reading it like a novel. Any one interested in android development really should read everything in there as there are some concepts/libraries that have really changed from the out dated tutorials you will find around the web.
