Preparing a Wedding like an Android Developer — Part 1
She said YES!
Well… it happened, I am a married man now. That was a heck of a journey; I would have never imagined that I could have fun preparing a wedding.
Do you want to know the trick? Bring what you love and are passionate about, into your daily life tasks.
That was it! I took the preparation of the wedding like I do with my personal projects. (At the end it is a project, and indeed personal)
Everything is over now, and we enjoyed a lovely wedding, so I decided to share my journey. I will explain it by parts:
- The Preparation
- The Architecture
- The Guest Onboarding
- The Invitation
- The Wedding Day
It’s going to be techinal, don’t worry
The Preparation
As mentioned before, I took it as a personal project, but this time I would be working together with my partner.
In this first part, I am going to explain the tools, initial planning, and ideas we had. Note that you could apply these in other situations.
How could we keep track of all the tasks, activities, ideas in a way that we don’t collide?
Why not use Kanban practices?
Trello to the rescue
Most likely you know Trello, it’s the perfect friend for this kind of project.
- Setup a board with four columns, Backlog, Doing, Waiting, Done
- Create labels for different categories (catering, transport, hotels, guests…)
- Start filling it with tasks and ideas
As you can see on the gif above, there are a LOT of tasks. Trello makes it easy to keep track of them, check who is doing what, add some deadlines and much more.
Extra tip: Add to Trello chrome extension
https://github.com/walteranderson/add-to-trello
Next, we need a place to store all the files like contracts, speeches, information, and ideas.
Google Drive
It can get quite chaotic when you start getting contracts or information about things you want to book, or you booked, not only that, sometimes you need to write things down…
Use the cloud! Simple and easy, create some folders organize yourself and share documents and excel files where both can edit at the same time.
We kept things like:
- Guest list
- Spences sheet
- Hotel bookings and information
- The Contracts with the DJ, location, etc.
Paper invitations are too old school
My grandma is still waiting for the invitation letter, but we decided to create an App instead!
Why not use my skills to have an entirely different way to invite people?
But we did not only want to send an invite, we also wanted a two-way communication, a dynamic app where we can give information or help our guests. (I will explore it in the next posts)
Firebase!
A perfect tool for bootstrapping an app like that, and for the amount of user we will have, it will be FREE!
If you don’t know Firebase yet, go ahead and check it out
Guestbooks are boring
Why not make it interactive?
We wanted a way for people to share they wishes, thoughts an pictures before, during and after the wedding, so we added a feature on the app and provided a simple web with a chat-style guestbook.
I was afraid to broadcast it live during the wedding (you know… alcohol, friends, embarrassing pictures…) but at the end, it was a great idea.
Let’s start
We have the main tools setup; we have an initial idea of what we need.
Let’s build it!
On the next part, I will break down the different features of the app and explain some of the beautiful parts of building it.
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