Skills
About
A co-worker of my ColorStick project client wanted an app for a side business she was looking to run. The app's concept was a "Thought of the day" app, focusing on simplicity, brevity and community.
What it does
Each day the app will display a new thought. Each thought has a specific category it falls under, with each category lasting for a few days. Users can then make a private journal entry based on a dedicated portion in the app. The app also allows users to view previous thoughts dating back to the start of the app. Implementing a full-out community feature to the app would be difficult, costly, and challenging for the clients to maintain. Instead, a place in the app allows users to get an invitation to a Slack workspace to connect with others.
Challenges I ran into
Because I was hired in a project-based capacity, I needed to ensure that the clients could manage the app on their own once the project was finished. The clients are not app developers themselves, so I had to base some decisions around that fact. I ended up setting up a shared Google sheet that acted as a database, where the clients could quickly and easily enter the daily thoughts themselves. Using Google Cloud with the Sheets API, I made the app pull data from that sheet. This approach ended up fitting the app's needs exceptionally well. The other part was trying to develop a way to implement community without racking up server costs while also keeping it easy for the clients to manage. After a fair amount of discussion with the clients, we decided on Slack. Getting the functionality I could out of the Slack free tier was not easy, but like the utilization of Google sheets it ended up working very well.
What I learned
This project strengthened existing skills such as building cross-platform apps with Flutter and communicating/working with clients. But working for a company that was still developing its vision and scope also allowed me to assist with defining the direction and vision while bringing it to life.