homebase /dev/entry/week4
Welcome to the homebase /dev/blog! We’ll be chronicling our development process here and making light of both the good and the bad alongside our technical ecosystem.
This post will work to summarize everything we did prior to officially beginning work on the product.
Our first task: to establish what homebase is, what it will do, who it will serve, and what problems it will work to solve. This was explored very early in the process due to how we chose to operate. Let me explain: homebase was not our only idea. We began this venture by establishing our team and then taking a week to gather ideas which were posted to an Asana group in the following format:
This way of submitting ideas requires much more work early, but it ensures that we have a clear and concise idea of what our product should be and what we need to do to achieve it. Here’s my early entry for homebase (which eventually became our product):
As you can clearly see, this outlines every important field that needs to be addressed before we can start working on our product. It’s incredibly important to know, even before you begin writing your first lines of code or designing early mock-ups of a UI, what you want your product to do and accomplish. If you fail to do this then you will likely need to go back and revisit entire parts of your product when you change your mind on an idea.
After establishing that homebase was going to be our product, we needed to have our first Scrum meeting to establish roles and a general timeline. We agreed that given roughly eight to ten weeks to get a final product ready for presentation, it would work best to establish sprints (goals) to be reached by our next meeting and, additionally, longer sprints lasting two weeks that would encompass our “big picture” goals. Here are some photos from that first meeting:
As you can see, we worked to establish roles for each of the four of us, technologies we think would best help us achieve our ideal product, and an early timeline for development. These have changed slightly, but for the most part, they remain consistent! We’re building the web app in Facebook’s React.JS and with Google’s Firebase.
As a final preliminary step, I wanted to establish a very early sense of branding so we would have an easier time working on style. After reaching out to some freelance graphic designers, this is the logo design we’re working with for now:
This post encompasses the development process up to and including week four. Check back later for posts detailing weeks five through ten! We’ll be sharing updates, changes, and technical details.
