Diary of a Rapid Application Build
Development diary of rapidly-building a Trello clone
Intro
This project documents the un-learning I had to do to get good at building rapid prototypes.
As an experienced developer, I’m used to building large, complex sites, with scalable architecture, clean code and best practices. Imagine how surprised I was when all this experience fell flat when tasked (opens new window) with a 4-hour coding challenge to build a basic Trello (opens new window) clone:
It turns out that the architectural skills I’ve spent years building up simply just got in the way when it came to building something fast, and I learned the hard way that to complete the challenge I needed to switch my mindset from army general to street fighter.
Outcome
“App Diary” (to use its short name!) ended up as a project of two complimentary halves:
- a blog-style diary (opens new window) of what I learned at each step of building the application
- a tagged repository (opens new window) of the above clone
The project was designed to remind my future self what not to do in these situations in future, and also as a contribution to the community and anyone learning programming and also tasked with a job interview project.
As it happens the project has stood me in very good stead for other rapid builds that I’ve done since.
Check them out on the search page.