"Double" StartUp or how the customer became an executor
Once in the sandbox with my first draft, I realized that I hadn’t really talked about anything. Although initially the idea was to share experience not with professionals ( which is really too much for me ), but with those people who have a choice - to try or not to try to do something with their own hands. Corrected.
Not by itself, of course, but from a wild and hardly controlled desire to somehow get close to one sweet lady, the idea arose to create a service that allows you to recognize the attitude of people (who know you) to themselves. First of all, this concerns personal relationships and clarification of the essence of the sympathies of the two "individuals" to each other. Secret clarification of this sensitive issue.
For some time I delved into the network in search of alternatives, but did not find anything like it. Unless, some dating sites offered some kind of tests for psychological compatibility. I needed a service that would “say” what “Masha” thinks about me, a very specific “Masha”. Of course, maybe I was looking badly - I do not exclude it.
Taking into account the fact that I was extremely far from programming, design and layout, but I had the opportunity to use the financial resources of the company unlimitedly and relatively irresponsibly, I decided that I would order the site.
Before buying something, I needed to understand what exactly I want to get on the way out. The consumer task of the service was set as follows - the service should help, "break through" the true feelings / desires / sympathies of one person to another. An important component is that the two objects know each other, at least at the level of everyday communication. That is, the service cannot evaluate the user's chances regarding Scarlett Johansson, but should help to reveal reciprocity, for example, in relation to a colleague or classmate.
By itself, an important criterion for the operation of the service was determined - this is anonymity. That is, a user blinded by passion (who was me) should not risk revealing his feelings, in case of failure of the whole event (suddenly the user already has a spouse or girlfriend), namely in the absence of reciprocity.
Now it was necessary to put a price tag on the project and involve someone in its implementation. However, it was necessary to understand the scale of the work. And the first thought that arose at this stage was to create a service for the most popular social networks. But, despite the terrible prevalence of the latter, work within their framework would dictate certain limitations. But what if the person of interest does not have his own page? Even then, I began to read various feature articles and discovered the concept of API. Actually, with this concept, the solution came - it should be a site that performs the task and it (the site) must have some external use tools (API) so that the project can be relayed.
For the "estimate" of the cost, of course, the data was not enough. There was a lack of awareness of the architecture of the project. In my understanding, this was the structure of the database and the scale of work with it. I did not evaluate layout and design at all, because I underestimated it.
It took about a month more, as free time was available, to outline the future database schema, and outline the operations with it.
And so, armed, taken from the ceiling, the figure of 100K, I began to look for hungry students, the presence of which I had no doubt. I will make a reservation, I did not trust and do not trust remote work. In addition, I really wanted to control the process, I wanted to take maximum participation in the process. To do this, everything was: an office, a workplace, money for a contract - all that was left was to find people. Naturally, I did not find current fools. For some reason, the applicants, recognizing only the number of related tables and the need for an API, wrote a bunch of emoticons in response to the number 50K for the project (I wanted to hire two) and no one wanted to listen to my favorite - “but here it would be necessary to redo it”. Another minus a month.
“There are no students - I will try the studio. How much will they ask? I’m sure 200K is enough for them. ”- With that kind of thought, I turned to the city’s studio. The closest to my expectations offer promised a breakup with 300K and 2 months of work. The most “experienced” studios, without blushing or blinking, asked for up to 700K for all the same 2 months.
Surprise knew no bounds. Why give such "money" when I myself had thought it all up here, thought it over and made it up? In order to create a couple of tables, and draw two triples of pages? Dormoedy - I had no other word for the studios at that time.
I must admit, although the money was not personal, I somehow did not want to give it back. And the point here is not even the “toad”, but rather the conscience that I took up, and I still refused the idea of abuse of office.
At this moment, I made a decision, which I advise all those who have a favorite answer to an extraordinary offer - “I don’t have time for this.” I decided to make the site myself.
To delve into a completely new path for myself on articles from the network - the path is clearly a dead end. So I went to the bookstore, where I learned a lot of new words like: perl, php, java, C ++, SQL etc. And of course I didn’t buy anything.
About two weeks it took me to learn new terms. In the end, I settled on a newbie kit: php + javascript. I bought a book, began to read. Then another book and another book. Something came up to me, but something didn’t, but it was enough to begin to delve into it. And I just wanted to delve into, and not sculpt. I wanted to get a less deep understanding of "site building" (sorry for the clumsy term).
At what exact moment my startup turned into a startup hobby, I really didn’t understand, but the process clearly fascinated me more than the goal itself, and the cutie who was the catalyst faded into the background. The process itself turned out to be much more interesting than the expectation of a result. And the development has begun.
However, it took only a month to understand the need for planning when creating a site. That's where I did not expect. As a person who was always at the place of the customer, I had a firm stereotype that having a plan in the process of creating a site is an extra reason to “play with the terms of this ugly performer”. Less than a month and the plan was ready, which I strictly adhered to in the future.
Another minus five months for development, on a couple of details of which I will dwell in more detail. The first thing that quite confused me was the abundance of negativity in relation to IE. Although, personally for me, everything turned out pretty well with this browser, although the work was carried out mainly in Opera. But with Chrome, on the contrary, I had to tinker with part of the layout.
The second, speaking of mastering the language at its basic level, I expected some serious difficulties, because I had no experience. But, that PHP, that JavaScript were quite easy for me (to the extent that I considered sufficient for the project).
But where I did not expect problems, problems arose. This is hosting. It was already necessary to begin testing outside the laptop, and for this, hosting was needed. But, as it turned out, hosting is hostile, which I did not even suspect.
In the articles devoted to the “right” hosting, I drowned very quickly and became completely confused in the terminology. And then it turned out that you need to understand how and what is configured for the hoster and, as a rule, the hoster does not adapt to you, and you pull your website into the hoster (although the price can fix the situation). In general, I decided to solve the problem of placing the resource on the network with the old, good and centuries-old “poke method”.
Difficulties arose with the name of the project. Not only was it not easy to come up with, but really strange things also happened. As soon as the name appeared in my head and was deemed suitable, I checked it through the registrar. But I missed the first two names. Entering everything on the same registrar, after a couple of weeks and with the willingness to buy a domain, he was already taken. As a result, the project was named - LovePinger and was immediately registered in the “.com” zone.
Less than a month and a test of three hosters with a stop in the USA. Honestly, I didn’t even think about it. But, as it turned out, it was much easier for a newcomer with a very modest knowledge of English to independently fill in and configure the site precisely outside the boundaries of his dearly beloved Homeland.
As a result, after eight or nine months (I don’t remember), I still uploaded the project to the network, but I’m more pleased to see a new hobby. A kind of “double” StartUp has come out, and new useful and useless ideas are already spinning in my head, the realization of which I can already think of not as a customer, but also as a performer, which is undoubtedly much more interesting.
At some point, I called back to the typesetter that I was engaged in our corporate website. He called and apologized for his "here it would be necessary to quickly redo it." I changed my outlook on the pricing of the studios, and also realized the grins that were not accepted by students in a row. Yes, perhaps I was wrong. Yes, perhaps “drawing a couple of pages” is extremely far from the real work of the developer.
This is the story of the creation of the project, which has only the beginning and, who knows, maybe there will be a continuation. Time will tell. Link to the project - www.lovepinger.com . I took Valerian, breathing evenly.
For beginners who are on the way: to do or not to do, I can summarize my experience , maybe it will help:
Good luck and good luck!
UPD # 1
Whoever you are, thank you friend for the invite :)
UPD # 2
Many thanks to all the Habrovsk people who paid attention to my modest post and project.
Special thanks for your advice and feedback. I already considered some of them, it takes time for something, but in any case, thanks to your warm welcome, I want to work on the project further.
May strength and good mood come with you!
Not by itself, of course, but from a wild and hardly controlled desire to somehow get close to one sweet lady, the idea arose to create a service that allows you to recognize the attitude of people (who know you) to themselves. First of all, this concerns personal relationships and clarification of the essence of the sympathies of the two "individuals" to each other. Secret clarification of this sensitive issue.
For some time I delved into the network in search of alternatives, but did not find anything like it. Unless, some dating sites offered some kind of tests for psychological compatibility. I needed a service that would “say” what “Masha” thinks about me, a very specific “Masha”. Of course, maybe I was looking badly - I do not exclude it.
Taking into account the fact that I was extremely far from programming, design and layout, but I had the opportunity to use the financial resources of the company unlimitedly and relatively irresponsibly, I decided that I would order the site.
Before buying something, I needed to understand what exactly I want to get on the way out. The consumer task of the service was set as follows - the service should help, "break through" the true feelings / desires / sympathies of one person to another. An important component is that the two objects know each other, at least at the level of everyday communication. That is, the service cannot evaluate the user's chances regarding Scarlett Johansson, but should help to reveal reciprocity, for example, in relation to a colleague or classmate.
By itself, an important criterion for the operation of the service was determined - this is anonymity. That is, a user blinded by passion (who was me) should not risk revealing his feelings, in case of failure of the whole event (suddenly the user already has a spouse or girlfriend), namely in the absence of reciprocity.
Now it was necessary to put a price tag on the project and involve someone in its implementation. However, it was necessary to understand the scale of the work. And the first thought that arose at this stage was to create a service for the most popular social networks. But, despite the terrible prevalence of the latter, work within their framework would dictate certain limitations. But what if the person of interest does not have his own page? Even then, I began to read various feature articles and discovered the concept of API. Actually, with this concept, the solution came - it should be a site that performs the task and it (the site) must have some external use tools (API) so that the project can be relayed.
For the "estimate" of the cost, of course, the data was not enough. There was a lack of awareness of the architecture of the project. In my understanding, this was the structure of the database and the scale of work with it. I did not evaluate layout and design at all, because I underestimated it.
It took about a month more, as free time was available, to outline the future database schema, and outline the operations with it.
And so, armed, taken from the ceiling, the figure of 100K, I began to look for hungry students, the presence of which I had no doubt. I will make a reservation, I did not trust and do not trust remote work. In addition, I really wanted to control the process, I wanted to take maximum participation in the process. To do this, everything was: an office, a workplace, money for a contract - all that was left was to find people. Naturally, I did not find current fools. For some reason, the applicants, recognizing only the number of related tables and the need for an API, wrote a bunch of emoticons in response to the number 50K for the project (I wanted to hire two) and no one wanted to listen to my favorite - “but here it would be necessary to redo it”. Another minus a month.
“There are no students - I will try the studio. How much will they ask? I’m sure 200K is enough for them. ”- With that kind of thought, I turned to the city’s studio. The closest to my expectations offer promised a breakup with 300K and 2 months of work. The most “experienced” studios, without blushing or blinking, asked for up to 700K for all the same 2 months.
Surprise knew no bounds. Why give such "money" when I myself had thought it all up here, thought it over and made it up? In order to create a couple of tables, and draw two triples of pages? Dormoedy - I had no other word for the studios at that time.
I must admit, although the money was not personal, I somehow did not want to give it back. And the point here is not even the “toad”, but rather the conscience that I took up, and I still refused the idea of abuse of office.
At this moment, I made a decision, which I advise all those who have a favorite answer to an extraordinary offer - “I don’t have time for this.” I decided to make the site myself.
To delve into a completely new path for myself on articles from the network - the path is clearly a dead end. So I went to the bookstore, where I learned a lot of new words like: perl, php, java, C ++, SQL etc. And of course I didn’t buy anything.
About two weeks it took me to learn new terms. In the end, I settled on a newbie kit: php + javascript. I bought a book, began to read. Then another book and another book. Something came up to me, but something didn’t, but it was enough to begin to delve into it. And I just wanted to delve into, and not sculpt. I wanted to get a less deep understanding of "site building" (sorry for the clumsy term).
At what exact moment my startup turned into a startup hobby, I really didn’t understand, but the process clearly fascinated me more than the goal itself, and the cutie who was the catalyst faded into the background. The process itself turned out to be much more interesting than the expectation of a result. And the development has begun.
However, it took only a month to understand the need for planning when creating a site. That's where I did not expect. As a person who was always at the place of the customer, I had a firm stereotype that having a plan in the process of creating a site is an extra reason to “play with the terms of this ugly performer”. Less than a month and the plan was ready, which I strictly adhered to in the future.
Another minus five months for development, on a couple of details of which I will dwell in more detail. The first thing that quite confused me was the abundance of negativity in relation to IE. Although, personally for me, everything turned out pretty well with this browser, although the work was carried out mainly in Opera. But with Chrome, on the contrary, I had to tinker with part of the layout.
The second, speaking of mastering the language at its basic level, I expected some serious difficulties, because I had no experience. But, that PHP, that JavaScript were quite easy for me (to the extent that I considered sufficient for the project).
But where I did not expect problems, problems arose. This is hosting. It was already necessary to begin testing outside the laptop, and for this, hosting was needed. But, as it turned out, hosting is hostile, which I did not even suspect.
In the articles devoted to the “right” hosting, I drowned very quickly and became completely confused in the terminology. And then it turned out that you need to understand how and what is configured for the hoster and, as a rule, the hoster does not adapt to you, and you pull your website into the hoster (although the price can fix the situation). In general, I decided to solve the problem of placing the resource on the network with the old, good and centuries-old “poke method”.
Difficulties arose with the name of the project. Not only was it not easy to come up with, but really strange things also happened. As soon as the name appeared in my head and was deemed suitable, I checked it through the registrar. But I missed the first two names. Entering everything on the same registrar, after a couple of weeks and with the willingness to buy a domain, he was already taken. As a result, the project was named - LovePinger and was immediately registered in the “.com” zone.
Less than a month and a test of three hosters with a stop in the USA. Honestly, I didn’t even think about it. But, as it turned out, it was much easier for a newcomer with a very modest knowledge of English to independently fill in and configure the site precisely outside the boundaries of his dearly beloved Homeland.
As a result, after eight or nine months (I don’t remember), I still uploaded the project to the network, but I’m more pleased to see a new hobby. A kind of “double” StartUp has come out, and new useful and useless ideas are already spinning in my head, the realization of which I can already think of not as a customer, but also as a performer, which is undoubtedly much more interesting.
At some point, I called back to the typesetter that I was engaged in our corporate website. He called and apologized for his "here it would be necessary to quickly redo it." I changed my outlook on the pricing of the studios, and also realized the grins that were not accepted by students in a row. Yes, perhaps I was wrong. Yes, perhaps “drawing a couple of pages” is extremely far from the real work of the developer.
This is the story of the creation of the project, which has only the beginning and, who knows, maybe there will be a continuation. Time will tell. Link to the project - www.lovepinger.com . I took Valerian, breathing evenly.
For beginners who are on the way: to do or not to do, I can summarize my experience , maybe it will help:
- To do or not to do if there is no experience and knowledge at all? Do. There are no people who know everything, but anyone can become knowledgeable. And knowledge (in any volume) does not bring harm.
- Learning to do something on articles from the network is the road to nowhere. Need to read books.
- Using someone else's code is quite normal, but it’s right to take it as a basis and create your own in order to understand the author’s logic, and suddenly it’s incorrect.
- Planning when creating a site is a very important thing. For example, as a beginner, it seemed to me that the issue of authorization was the last question. No, no. The issue of authorization is the foundation of architecture and needs to be thought out in advance so that you do not have to redo the project closer to the final.
- Modularity is a great thing. The more functionality to allocate to specialized modules, the more mobile the code as a whole becomes, the easier it is to edit and control it. My first steps, as a layman, came down to “stuffing” everything and everything into one file, but this is the same as a book without division into chapters and without page numbering.
- A controversial experience, but the forums did not help me choose a host, but only confused me. Therefore, I tried several and stopped at where my project worked, as I wanted.
- The choice of technology, at a minimum, the choice of the language of the server side, depends only on the functionality of the project. PHP seemed to me the easiest. But in order to make a choice, I first had to realize what I want. Only knowing the requirements for functionality, I was able to choose a language, corny studying the table of contents of books.
- The "correct" site does not tolerate a mess. Server dad should be an example of order and logic. Scripts for external access to one, internal to another, pages to the third. There will be order - it will be easier to understand and work on project security.
- “Cool function” (technology) is far from always good. An effective solution is primarily a solution that is understandable to its author.
- There are no "minor" errors, that is, there are no errors that can be "hammered" into. If you do not know the cause of the error, then there is no guarantee that the error will not come out sideways. Several times I wanted to close my eyes on the jambs with layout, manifesting themselves in only one of the browsers, but as it turned out, the error applied to all browsers, just some did not ignore it, while others “jammed” (corrected). Take at least the incorrectly closed tag (less) br / (more). Yes, yes, for a beginner - this can be a problem.
Good luck and good luck!
UPD # 1
Whoever you are, thank you friend for the invite :)
UPD # 2
Many thanks to all the Habrovsk people who paid attention to my modest post and project.
Special thanks for your advice and feedback. I already considered some of them, it takes time for something, but in any case, thanks to your warm welcome, I want to work on the project further.
May strength and good mood come with you!