I don’t mean that, of course. I actually love app dev. It’s super fun to make cool stuff show up on phones. Two months ago I finished building an entirely different app. Great stuff. Highly recommend. So let me tell you want the “Super secret app project” is, and why it’s dumb.
Basically, the idea was to build a form of social media that allowed people to leave real-time reviews for clubs and restaurants to gauge the mood of a particular location. To put it in simple terms, its biggest audience would probably be bar crawlers.
Now I have no desire to facilitate bar crawling, but I liked the idea because I thought if it worked it could be used for a bunch of stuff besides partying. Basically, real-time Yelp. That’d be pretty cool right?
I still think the idea would be pretty cool, but as I went further along in the process, it because clear that I basically built a partying app, and that’s all it was really going to do. That’s not great.
Also, the person I was working with simply did not pull her weight. And she fed me wrong information (actually, she basically straight-up lied). And she basically got nothing done. Kinda bitter, not gonna lie. Bet you couldn’t tell. But whatever, lesson learned.
Anyway, I don’t actually like thinking a lot about this project because it makes me angry but let me outline the main takeaways from this experience.
First of all, the internet is so frikin cool. And I’m not talking about the websites you know and love, I’m talking about the actual infrastructure of the internet. All the servers and communications protocols and information transfer are literally so cool. And honestly, web dev is super fun. I love all the careful aesthetics. And I never would have known about it had I never started this project.
Not only did this project teach me about how to leverage the internet to do my bidding, but it also showed me what not to do. Let me tell you, I’m never going to touch Javascript again if I can avoid it. TypeScript, all day, every day. It’s the only way. And you better believe I’m never using a REST Api for big projects. GraphQL, all day, every day. It’s the only way. Heavens above I love TypeScript and GraphQL.
Also, as a fun little tidbit, I used Express.js as my server framework, but in the past months, I’ve learned Rust, and you can build lightning fast servers with Rust. Gosh I love Rust. Tokio is simply the best.
Anyway, back to my lessons learned. Aside from technologies, the other lesson I learned from this project was that you need to be super careful about picking the people with whom you work on projects. I chose wrong. I could go on a long, bitter rant about this, but I’ll try to be civil. Communication is frikin key.
Anyway, I’m going to finish this post here. Like I said, thinking about this project and my old “business partner” makes me angry.