Hey friends!
My subscribers are usually good and driven people, so you are probably busy with some good stuff, so no time to wonder where this Rich guy has been for the past four months.
Well, TL;DR: After a few mini projects for fun, a failed SaaS project with a buddy of mine (we had no co-founder fit), and a month or two in figuring out what's next. I'm starting a new project.
I'm a natural born gamer, so this time, it's about my favorite topic in real life: home games.
The first part of the app is a score tracker to answer a few questions that bother me for the past 25+ years:
How do you track scores and determine who's the best in your bar card round? How often does your kid really win in UNO, and when is the breaking point for them to start to beat your smarty pants ass in Chess? Who is actually better in FIFA, you or your old overly self-confident friends?
From a technical perspective, I also wanted to play around with Rails 8 and try out a new marketing approach. Most of the SaaS I've built had payments and user management integrated, and I've never used any marketing funnels outside of a landing page inside of my app or a page on my blog. This time, I would like to start with funnels early on and delegate payments and user management to a different platform: @clickfunnels.
I did some initial sketching on paper. I usually start by sketching a screen of the app's most crucial feature and then draw some class boxes to think through how this might pan out regarding the data model.
It's funny how small a project is inside one's head. If you look at the drawing, you'll see that I was very optimistic about the data model fitting in just some bits of space, only to realize that there are way more things I want and need to do in the app.
I also realized that it's the end of the year, and I don't remember reading any technical books this year 🙀
So now, 25 minutes daily are dedicated to Layered Design for Ruby on Rails Applications.
With technical books, I like to have central questions in the back of my mind to make the reading more purposeful and effective. With this particular book, I didn't know exactly what I wanted to find there and why I was reading it. But now that I'm 25 pages in, I got a few things out of it already, and I see the author providing a lot of value in discussing architectural design patterns and fundamentals applied to Rails as well as The Rails Way. So I went with these questions to start with:
🏆 What fundamental DOs and DONTs in Rails architecture can be extracted from the book for better decision-making?
🍇 What are some low-hanging architectural Rails fruit for fresh SaaS applications?
🔌 What can I transfer to working with public APIs? (well, that's a question I always have in my reading backpack).
As always, the reading session ends with a couple of minutes of dodgy retrospective:
I'm sure this won't be last technical book this year so if you have read any good programming book this year, please let me know!