Another Weekend, Another Feature Deployment

Aphinya Dechalert -

Another weekend, another feature is released — well, that’s the current game plan and so far.

The thing about building apps is that we often come up with grand plans, only to have them fall short because we ran out of time. This is where consistency comes in.

Image I found floating around on my phone. I don’t know who it belongs to or who made it.

There’s a long list of things I want this app of mine to do —and I’m working my way through it one weekend at a time.

Without further ado, here are this weekend’s app updates.

Pomodoro Timer

For this week, the main focus has been putting in the Pomodoro timer. I also decided to add the option of toggling some fire ambiance. Personally, I like a bit of background noise to keep me on task and remain immersed in whatever it is I’m doing.

There’s a separate settings page with useful details like:

  • how long it will take to complete one focus session
  • the number of cycles in a focus session

Focus draggable column

It’s easy to get lost in the to-do lists so I made a special column to keep the focus. The idea is that it keeps you in a single task mode rather than trying to multitask during a focus session.

It also keeps you away from the distractions of to-do lists and the mental load of reviewing how much you’ve got on your plate.

Additional knick-knacks

I added a ‘Today is…’ text, mostly because I work from home and tend to lose track of what day it is in general. Surely, I’m not the only one on this. It also gives grounding on how much time you actually have left for the week.

I still haven’t implemented mobile view support yet. In part, it’s because I want to get the desktop layout right first. So yes, it will probably look quite bad on mobile but works on desktop 🍄

Lessons from this weekend

1. Always test the build before committing to GitHub

  • Vercel automatically builds based on commits. If you don’t test out your build and commit to GitHub, you’re going to be building a broken. It sounds simple but when you’re working on a solo app, processes can go out the window.

2. Refactor as you go

  • Code smell will always exist. Spray it with some code cleaning on a regular basis to keep the bugs away. Now is always the best time to start commenting and documenting your code to help with your navigation.

3. Have a features roadmap

  • It helps if you know where you’re going with your weekend/solo apps. It also lets you figure out your personal burndown rate. It’s easy to overestimate and under-deliver, resulting in a bout of sadness because you didn’t do as much as you thought you could. Having a features roadmap lets you see how far you’ve come and where you’re about to go next.

That’s it for now. Until next weekend — check out Mushroom Cow 🐄