20 Week Anniversary

An overview of past 20 weeks of ZoomAdmin Development
It’s hard to believe, but it’s been 20 weeks since we started building ZoomAdmin in a team environment.
Granted, I started the to work on the general architecture even a few weeks before that, but full scale development was started 20 weeks ago.
You can find progress blog posts going back to Week 1 on our Blog, but let’s do a quick overview.
Week 1 – 4

  • Decision made to work on ZoomAdmin and make it my primary focus
  • Building the initial team, finding contractors to help with the development
  • Deciding on the initial Dev Stack, tools, processes and setting up the initial architecture
  • Configuring Automated builds

 
Week 5 – 8

  • Streamlining new contractor training processes with videos.
  • More overall architectural changes
  • On-Boarding new contractors
  • Researching React component libraries
  • Better development flow

Week 9 – 12

  • Feeling stressed!
  • 10 Week anniversary – deployed a basic landing page/website
  • Gathering more feedback on our product from potential users
  • Continued progress on the app
  • More streamlined development/hiring process
  • Deciding on End 2 End Testing tool

Week 13 – 16

  • Started using Katalon for End 2 End Testing
  • The larger app is coming together with all components having met milestones
  • Feeling accomplished after seeing larger milestones met.
  • Spending more time on UI/UX to have a more pleasant user experience.
  • Starting to work on more complex integration parts.
  • Take a few days off to unwind.

Week 17 – 20

  • Implemented new React component library which made the UI much more feature rich.
  • Starting doing weekly demo videos
  • Continued progress

And here We are on the Week 20, when I decided to go back to our public website and start building it out. I’m hoping which is where you’re reading this now.
It wasn’t as simple as install wordpress and call it a day. I wanted to custom build it to have full control on all parts, including performance and scaling.
It took me way over the initial estimate, but at the end I’m glad I did it. I went with a solution that I really wanted.
I came up with a hybrid solution, using WordPress as the backend and integrating the data via APIs into my app and you can judge the end result yourself. If interested on the details, check back tomorrow, I’m planning on doing a tutorial on how to achieve this for your projects.
So to warp up, 20 weeks is a long time, but not so much for building a product this size, we still have a lot to do to get to our MVP.
Would love to get your comments/thoughts on the LinkedIn share of this post, and be sure to subscribe to get progress updates weekly.
Michael Paltayan