#micheledoesweb
One of my goals for 2016 is to successfully complete a side project. I haven’t had a personal side project since college, and I’ve been wanting to round out my experience with more web development. This isn’t my first web rodeo, but I haven’t worked on a majority-web project since 2012. It was in Rails 3, used Bootstrap 2, and GOSH was it fantastic.
So what am I going to build? I was inspired by a hackathon project I did in 2012 and created a list of features this hypothetical product would need. Feast your eyes on PicsNearMe! It’s Snapchat meets Shutterfly! Visiting a museum, park, or just hanging out? Create a group with friends and then take and share your photos right in the moment. Afterwards, export your images to social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest to show the rest of the world how much fun you had, or download a gorgeous photo album for nostalgia.
Why this terrible startup idea? It happens to cover some of the most common web application features:
- Mobile-friendly authentication
- Image download, upload, and processing
- User, group, and event management
- Image export to 3rd party services
- PDF generation (for the photo albums)
- Transactional emails
There are some additional technical aspects as well:
- Securing uploads and downloads
- Creating a continuous delivery pipeline
- Creating performant image processing, album generation
- Content filtering
I plan on writing weekly and putting about 5 hours into this per week. Luckily I’m starting this at a point where I have no conference talks for 3 months. Getting started is always the hardest part!