Creating an MVP (part 1)— a noobs point of view
Hello everyone! This is my second post writing on software developer matters — from my noobie’s point of view. I’m eager to write about this new challenge I’m committing myself to, well last year I did so haha.
I’ll be taking on the following roles for the MVP we’re building and presenting with my group for Holberton’s final project (Montevideo, Uruguay):
→ Project Manager
→ Dev Ops
→ Backend (second handler)
Project Manager
For my PM role I watched long hours of youtube videos on how to create an MVP from scratch, here are some of the resources I consulted:
- Making sense of MVP — The CRM Team
- Product Management in Startups: MVP to 4.0 roadmap and product manager tasks — Slidebean
- What do I do as a Product Manager? — Chloe Shih
- How to Plan an MVP — Michael Seibel
- Building Product — Michael Seibe
I prepared myself by getting to know the following organization apps:
Notion
It’s truly an aesthetic web & mobile app, and it does have tons of features to use to best customize your experience. However, as much I love using this app for my personal life planning, I chose better not to use it due to the fact that as many features as it may have, it is not an easy task for someone to learn it in such little time as in my group’s case.
However, I do recommend it for anyone who considers themselves to be a pretty aesthetic and visual person. I’ve been using it for 6 months or so, and came to really love it. I do at least one daily check-in plus double check my first quarter goals, and so much more. There are a lot of templates to start off with in order to make it easier for you here, from the Notion creators and from creators all around the world.
Trello
This was one strong competitor against the app I finally chose to use. I found it to be a gorgeous web and mobile app, really useful and intuitive to use. You can create a project and add a to do list with components that can be easily dragged with the mouse to the doing or done list. Also it’s important to mention you can create a resources column or relevant links column.
Despite how much I liked it, in the real world companies use other apps more and since I’m going to start looking for a job in the tech industry I wanted me and my group to get familiar with the industries standard.
Jira
This was the chosen one. Why? Not only it’s the industry’s standard here in Uruguay, but it’s also used for issue tracking and project management all around the world, while also implementing the agile project managment method.
It’s been pretty easy for the people in my group who didn’t previously have knowledge of it, to understand how to work with the app.
It’s a web and mobile app, which makes it even easier to always be able to keep track of how we’re doing. In case you forgot to comment on something, it’s just one effortless movement of grabbing your mobile and checking the app away.
While being PM is not just choosing which app to use for organizing the MVP, right now it’s the part in which I feel the most confident to share with the internet.
Dev Ops
Next up is the Dev Ops role → is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops). At first I was nowhere near to understanding what was the role about, but now after reading a lot online and asking irl I came to the conclusion that my profile fits the job description.
As you may see in the picture above, there are a lot of softwares available to develop oneself as a DevOps. I personally believe that the Amazon Cloud Services will suit our project the best.
That’s due to the fact that: you pay for what you use; and that’s convenient for a students’ budget. Also here in Uruguay there are quite a lot of company’s going from start ups to quite big ones who chose AWS.
DevOps is all about the unification and automation of processes, and DevOps engineers are instrumental in combining code, application maintenance, and application management. All of these tasks rely on understanding. not only development life cycles, but DevOps culture, and its philosophy, practices, and tools. — Source: Red Hat
Not to forget that AWS certifications are achievable if you work enough. I’m not saying all of the other options aren’t the best! But for this project it may work the best out of almost all. I’d really love to expand my knowledge on the Google Cloud and Azure as well.
Backend — Second Handler
Reaching my last, but nowhere to be least role, the Backend programmer. Since I first started Holberton I found myself falling in love with the Back End of Software Development. I acquired the computational thinking in no time and worked smoothly with C and Python programming languages.
With all of that said, we instead chose: Java → a high-level, class-based, object-oriented programming language that is designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible.
The reason why we chose Java programming language is due to the fact that’s it’s a truly versatile programming language at it’s used by a variety of company’s — <<mission & vision>> — I found to resemble with.
Moreover, the framework Salesforce uses is Apex, which is pretty similar tu Java’s syntax, so: easier for us to learn it in the near future.
To conclude,
As I disclaimed in the posts title I’m still a noobie to all of this topics, I have some months in the tech industry as a student, but no real experience (yet) in the real world. By doing this final project we’ll be having our first almost real world experience of building and MVP in a company. We already have the idea of the project, so who knows? Maybe our MVP transforms into a day-to-day app for people here in Uruguay.
Thanks a lot for reading me! I hope this post was useful to you, or that I may have sparked some ideas for you. I’m really looking forward to my next post and getting to share my experience.
