As I work on more side projects the concept/idea of a minimum viable product is becoming more and more important; especially for someone like me who generally builds products alone with limited resources. I have started, put on hold, never finished or completely shelved a large number of side projects since I started programming. The reasons range from I lost motivation (which is a shame) to I didn’t have a complete understanding of what the applications true purpose was anymore (poor planning and design) and how it would benefit the user (complete lack of understanding of the market and what users are after). The last one started to become very common and I needed a new way to approach my side projects. Working on something cool and fun is great and all but there is a high chance if you don’t have a clear picture of what you want to achieve and the minimum requirements needed to distribute your app to users then your enthusiasm will at some point dwindle away. Also if you start with an idea that is so big it can become daunting and you will never finish it.
I started taking a new approach to my side projects now. Whenever I start, I note down what I exactly want to build (at a high level only), how I feel it would benefit the users (very important to understand), and what are the minimum features needed to ensure that I can get it to user’s devices to make it worthwhile using in a timely manner (the details are important here). Not only is this process helping me focus and know exactly what I need to achieve but it also allows me to mentally picture a roadmap of sort. I can easily see that features A and B need to be done for the application to be worthwhile and features C, D and E can be easily added later in patches and with feedback from users I can continue to refine and craft an app better tailored to them.
Why am I posting this you may ask? Well several weeks ago I posted about how I am/was going to be working on either one or two new applications. In that time I managed to get a clearer picture of what I wanted to achieve, how it would benefit someone and what the minimum features needed to be implemented for it to be worthwhile. If I didn’t spend this time understanding this then my new project probably would have eventually been shelved at a later point and I would not have built an end to end product for people to use. With this new approach I not only get to showcase my skills with complete apps (fundamentally the absolute minimum to be worthwhile, but apps nonetheless) and provide a product people will hopefully find useful in a timeframe that isn’t insane.
Just in time for the start of the new financial year I will be releasing an alpha version of my bill tracking UWP app in either late July or early August for the Windows Store (more information about this when the release date gets closer). I have a very basic prototype up and running and will be working on refining that to be the final app (took under three hours to get something I wanted functional thanks to the great documentation Microsoft has on UWP development, C# and XAML). Until the app is released I will be trying to write more frequently covering certain aspects of the app, what I have enjoyed programming and what I have had difficulty doing. Stay tuned for that because July and August are going to be jam packed full of programming goodness.
Christopher Tom Kochovski 