[Note To Self]

I had coffee with a couple of my Iron Yard classmates yesterday, just to catch up.  We got to talking about projects and I started telling them about how after working on my own, personal project, I really appreciated all the planning that went into our capstone projects.

So I started playing around with a project that I’ve called AO Chants.  When I started it, I knew that I wanted it to put the American Outlaws’ chants and songs into a separate web app.  I knew that I wanted to use Material-UI because I had used it on Fan Portals and I just generally liked the “clean” look of it.  I knew that I didn’t know what else I was going to put into it.

I know what you’re thinking.  Scope creep, right?  Well, you wouldn’t be wrong.  After working on two very organized and well-thought out projects (Fan Portals is one, the other is Developers.Vegas), I welcomed the mayhem.  Actually, I caused it.  In my resume and on my LinkedIn profile, I tout myself as being a creative at heart.  If there was ever a time to get creative, this was it.

The original non-plan was to have AO Chants be a single-page application.  But I started thinking about my stack… I’m a junior full stack developer (My business cards say so!), and I don’t want to be a jack of all trades, master of none (Which is a GREAT show…).  So the non-plan started to become a plan.

So right now, I’m really treating AO Chants as an exercise.  I decided that I wanted to play with Firebase (Yes, that’s intentional.).  We used it on the Developers.Vegas project and I figured that AO Chants would a good place to try it out for myself.  Because I didn’t know how to get it started, I had to learn more about Firebase… and here’s where scope creep kind of comes in.

Authentication wasn’t in the original non-plan, but now it’s in there.  Why?  I decided on having an Admin page where I could add chants from the web app without having to go into the database.  Luckily, there’s Firebase Authentication.  I’m in the middle of trying to get it to work, so I can’t really tell you much about it.  I’m using it because it’s there and why not?

Deploying.  Well… I thought about Heroku.  One of my partners on the Fan Portals project handled the deployment.  So I wanted to try it myself.  The non-plan included deploying the app on Heroku, but again, Google has their own tools for that, too.  I might as well keep everything in the family, right?

After I finish up AO Chants, I think the non-plan plan is to plan the next project.  What will it be?  I don’t know yet, but I’m excited about the possibilities… stay tuned!