Introduction
Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Being a software developer can be very frustrating.
If you are a five-star chef, people will see (and taste) your work.
If you are a brilliant actor, people will enjoy your movies and appreciate your work.
If you are a good writer, people will read your books and see your talent (or lack thereof).
Not so much for a developer! Unless you are a developer yourself, and you happen to have access to the source code, and you also happen to be proficient in the language that the software is programmed with, you will never see the beautify (or ugliness) of the code behind it.
That means that people generally don’t have a clue of what it really means to make software.
This is why I want to share with you every step of what it takes to write a piece of software from start to finish, during a whole year.
We will cover the basics (installing the relevant tools on your computer), the thought process, the coding, the deployment and the refinements in 52 articles, every Friday, for a year.
This is targeted to:
- People who want to have an idea of what it takes to write a software
- Beginners who are interested in learning, and want a complete tutorial
- Software engineers, beginners and experts alike, who are interested in parts of the process and will be reading a few specific articles of interest
What are we going to build?
We are going to build a planning poker app.
— A planni-what?
A planning poker application. Bear with me. In the software engineering world, we usually break our work in small(ish) tasks, often called “stories”. To be able to estimate the amount of work (and thus, time) required to implement a specific piece, we usually gather together as a team and give an estimation for each individual stories.
A good way to make that efficient and fun (both being equally important), teams will often use a concept called Planning Poker to estimate the stories: everyone chooses a card that represents the amount of work for a story, and they would vote until they reach a consensus.
The value on the cards usually follow the Fibonacci sequence, as you can see above.
This app itself will be a web application (that means it will run in a browser), it will be real time (that means that every action, every event, will be sent to all players at the same time), it will be fast and it will be free.
Why this? Because it’s useful for developers, it’s real-time, and it will compliment my existing Agile retrospective tool rather well.
What technologies are we going to use?
In order to not burn our bridges right away, we will stay relatively open for now on the tech stack.
All we can say for now is that the front-end library (and ecosystem) will be React, and that we want our application to be accessible using the ARIA attributes and best practices. We also want our app to be multilingual.
This is were our journey begins.
