Building and launching my first product in 7 days — day 3 summary
No website pictures in this summary ☹️. Lot of learned experience though 🤓!
I got sick yesterday and had to cancel the stream. I thought I might still work off-stream but I just fell asleep around midnight.
I'm still not sure about the whole stream thing. I just feel weird when someone is watching me while I'm coding. I prefer these Medium stories much more!
I might partly substitute streaming with more tweeting though 🤔.
So as I said, not much was accomplished yesterday. I implemented a framework called ExpressJS. And boy was it a lot of pain.
Initially I thought that I won't be touching any routing mechanism for at least few days. The reason I decided to implement it right the next day after I wrote how I won't be using it is that it gives me much more freedom. And also you know, I guess it's much better to serve user with additional html file than to flood him with modals every time she clicks on something.
Even though the whole website is static I still wanted to have a simple routing mechanisn and I wanted to serve static files based on a route (e.g. /account should load account.html for user's account info page and / should load index.html for website home page).
ExpressJS seemed to accomplish just that. Additionally it seemed very lightweight and straight forward. Just what I needed!
I'm using Webpack to bundle my files. The thing with Webpack is that it's just great when it's doing everything it should be but it's giving me nightmares when it's screaming errors at me. I won't lie. It took me few hours to realise that I must not bundle server.js together with other files. Server.js is a file where all my routing logic is stored. Now it seems like a no-brainer — of course one won't bundle a server logic to be served in user's browser. Not so much no-brainer back then.
At first I wanted to have two separated Webpack configs. One for a browser and one for a server. I failed. I spent few hours trying to have Webpack generate two bundles and have it work with things like webpack --watch and hot reloading mechanisms.
What I eventually ended up with is just having to run webpack command every time I want to update website and then run node server.js. I'll definitely comeback to this since it's a lot of workflow pain.
I'm also not really sure which files are dev only and which also production files. I'm getting really confused there.
When you don't know all the frameworks, bundlers and all the other stuff the overhead of properly setting it all up is so frustrating!
Little did I know that a plan for implementing Firebase, posting items and user's log in together with account logic was doomed since I touched the Express.
Finally around midnight I got to implement very basic Firebase logic and logging in. I fell asleep not long after that.
I have to move fast today. Especially since I basically lost a whole day just setting things up. Not going to sleep unless full user account logic and posting new items is implemented 🚀.
This post is a part of 7 day challenge me going from web dev noob to a fully launched product.
Read the first day summary!
Read the second day summary!
Read the fourth day summary!
Read the fifth & sixth day summary!
I'm continuously updating a reddit post about this project.
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