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Show Notes
Introduction
- We will cover what were our biggest milestone projects, their challenges, and what we learned from them
- These are the milestone projects that got us to where we are today, they aren’t even close to every project though as in between all these there were plenty of others
- Some of the information will be anonymized (names changed, information redacted, etc.) due to NDAs but we will try to give a good picture of who and what we worked on
Projects
2014 - Massive website for a medical clinic
- Built-in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, CouchCMS
- Used a template and heavily altered it
- What we learned
- A ton of vanilla fundamentals
- Template implementation (positives and negatives)
- Internationalization (RU and EN)
- Cross-timezone client communication
- Tons of project management fundamentals were put in place with this project to hit deadlines
- couchCMS integration
- Challenges
- The huge time zone difference was a major challenge because of constant site updates
- At the beginning site needed to be updated daily with new testimonials
- Client initially didn’t want to update anything themselves but send us updates daily/weekly, so no CMS was put in place. Later this was changed and we had to implement a CMS into an existing site
2016 - Clicks to Riches - Chrome App Game
- HTML, CSS, JavaScript
- Clicks to Riches was a clicker game that started you off as a beggar and allowed you to progress to becoming king. It had fully hand-drawn assets, auto clickers based on upgrade purchases, and an endgame + system
- Chrome apps were becoming popular at the time so we dove into a ‘niche’ to potentially learn it and get clients
- What we learned
- Chrome app development
- Working in a slightly larger team (2 dev and a designer)
- Crunch
- Working with very static but complex layouts
- Gamification math
- Digital marketing/advertising
- Challenges
- Set some really tight deadline (I think like 3 weeks to get it done)
- Solving disagreements in game direction was initially tough to navigate
- The autosave/syncing feature was a bit tough to implement
- Not using any framework to control UI made the code quite messy and difficult to iterate on
2016/2017 - Contentlinq - optical retail Digital Asset manager and marketing material player
- HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, Cordova
- First time working with a small startup
- Help take their existing MVP and build a more robust platform
- The idea was the server (Digital Asset Manager) would host all the marketing content and then the players (tablets/computers) would show the content with playlists that were made on the server
- What we learned
- Agile project management techniques (sprints, Jira, etc.)
- Cross-platform development (android, ChromeOS, windows, web apps)
- jQuery and a ton of more complex JavaScript concepts
- Video playback
- Local storage hacks
- Challenges
- Cross-platform development was fairly new and had a lot of caveats and challenges
- Using low-powered Android devices to play content for 12+ hours a day was difficult
- Writing long-running JavaScript code is not easy as it’s not really meant for that
- Video playback on slow networks is a huge pain
2019 - Contentlinq - Optical demo app for a large corporation
- Vue.js, Cordova
- App was a glasses lens interactive demonstration app, so users could preview what an anti-reflective lens or a transitions lens did before buying them for example
- Was to be deployed to a huge retailer with 1k+ locations as a iOS app
- What we learned
- Vue.js is so much better for building reactive UI’s than vanilla JS
- Working with a large corporation is completely different
- Tons of compliance certifications
- Communication is slow
- Decision makers are scared to make decisions
- Challenges
- Compliance took a while (security)
- Safari webviews suck so not everything that worked in browser worked on the webview
- Corporations are very difficult to work with and get stuff from initial testing to full rollout, lots of politics involved
2020 - Fast Food Franchise Website
- Marketing website for franchisees
- Site contained information such as pricing for entrepreneurs to open up their own franchised location
- What we learned
- How to interact with remote teams (COVID)
- How to optimize a Webflow site (circa 2020)
- Webflow general
- Challenges
- Floating timelines
- Staff changes
- In-person workflow challenges (COVID lockdown vs essential industries [tech and food])
- Responsibility confusion (ie corporate email issues, analytics)
2021 - Solarians - NFT changing room for pixelated robots
- SvelteKit, Solana
- A web app that allowed a user to connect their Solana wallet, read the NFTs from their wallet and display specifically their Solarian (little pixelated robots)
- The user would then be able to buy items and put them on their robots
- The robots were animated (just gifs jumping up and down)
- Robots would also be able to be constructed into individual parts allowing users to assemble new robots from all the parts they own, these would just be for fun
- What we learned
- Sveltekit is an amazing full-stack framework
- Web3 was new but interesting to work with on a shallow level
- Communities were extremely toxic but also passionate
- General crypto currency knowledge
- Challenges
- Web3/Solana documentation was the worst I’d ever seen, tons of guesswork and figuring shit out on your own
- Working with gifs was pretty challenging to make sure that the items lined up and animated perfectly in line with the robots
- Web3 communities being toxic made it difficult to really enjoy the work
Shoutouts!
Michael LaRocca
