I’m about nine months into a six-month app challenge—obviously, a product launch failure, and yet, progress is still being made, albeit slower than I wanted.
I have learned throughout these months that six months was ambitious and that accomplishing that on a big project requires longer hours each week and sustained effort, which I still need to improve.
I am still spending some time each week working on Notic, but I think to improve my output I need to consider smaller chunks of work daily rather than a few hours at a time once a week.
Help has come from a friend who joined the project several months ago. She has helped bring motivation and software engineering help to architect the app. She also helps with many other aspects, such as user stories, db design, and much more, which I am extremely grateful for.
What I am Working on Now
At the moment, I am working on the data context for the server side. It currently doesn’t have one and grabs data from the server as and when needed. The data context is being added to abstract server and caching so that instead of grabbing a user from MongoDb, I can grab it from the data context, and that will figure out if it has the item cached or needs to grab it from the server.
This part is tricky, especially with dependency injection and working generically. Being new to C# and .NET, I need to check tutorials. Many tutorials on data contexts show each type of data having its own data context, such as userDataContext, meetingDataContext, and so on. What I am aiming for is a single server data context so that I can access dataContext.Users or dataContext.Meetings. It almost works, but it’s not quite there yet.
Other progress that has been made is that user login is almost ready. It hashes the passwords and provides a JWT with claims. We still need to store the JWT and use that on each API call. This is almost working and should be ready soon.
As soon as login is functioning fully and the data context is added in, I feel progress will accelerate, especially on the frontend of things. When these things are ready we can work in slices and work through the app one step at a time and build the frontend and backend at the same time.
I’ll provide another update within the week regarding the login and data context. Feel free to ask questions.