Day 5

Set up confirmation tokens for phone number verification today. It’s a pretty straightforward process to create your own.

When a new number is added, generate a unique token when you store the number. The point is to have something you can use to identify your phone number record, but isn’t…

Day 4

Got phone number storage and testing squared away today. Ended up with these columns in the phone table, which feels simple and clean:

number
token
confirmed_at

Day 19

Little things add up

Finished undo-ing my phone number experiment today. That rabbit trail hurt a bit.

Have to remember to keep it simple. No, simpler than that. The simplest thing that could possibly work. Then add another little essential thing…

Day 23

Testing time-specific notifications

Worked on testing notifications for Prompt today. The main idea with this application is to deliver writing prompts in time for a specific window, in order to create a daily writing habit. Notifications working well and occurring…

Day 9

Remember that product development is a marathon

Started adding content about the user-entered prompts to the dashboard today, but didn’t get very far. I was still working on a plane with no wifi, so it was tough to look up the information I needed. I…

Day 12

Signing out

Worked on the sign-out portion of Prompt today. Signing out is set up at the device level. Each device (browser) has a record in the devices table. Each row has a flag that indicates whether it is signed in or not. When the user clicks sign out, I look up the device…

Day 17

Switching gears to find some momentum

Signing up/signing in still isn’t totally finished, but I switched to something more interesting today, just for a change of pace. I‘m now sending a user who’s logged in back to the home page after they create a prompt, instead…

Day 10

Cookie troubles

Still struggling with cookies today. Finally found a way to set a cookie in my test, have it show up in my controller, and then return to the test again, but it doesn’t seem like the right way. Here’s what I have:

cookies["token"] =…

Day 8

Don’t wait until you’re traveling to download the documenation

Still fighting with tests for my phone first sign-in process today. After trying a few different things, I’ve written a test helper function to simulate visiting the site as a certain…

Day 6

Connecting to Twilio

I connected Prompt with Twilio today. Twilio is a service for sending text (SMS) messages, among other things. They have a really great API and if you have a need for sending texts in your application, I highly recommend them.