From now on the dev logs will probably be shorter and more technical as I actually start to build the services need to build the app.
This week I've been working on setting up the Google Cloud Platform infrastructure for the website using Terraform (a tool I've been wanting to learn for a while, and turns out it's pretty cool!). As a mini-project I created a simple static website hosting solution with GCS bucket, load balancer, and SSL certificate, with all the resources provisioned using terraform. The website now has proper HTTPS and custom domain support for the domain I purchased last week (comealong.app!). The frontend of the website was created pretty quickly using Next.js, React, and Tailwind CSS. The result of this work is the very website you're on right now!
Some very basic work has been done when it comes to the app, as I'm still getting familiar with Swift, SwiftUI, and the iOS ecosystem. I've been able to create a basic login screen and a basic loading screen, but neither of them are very interesting or complex at the moment. Much more to come in the future...
I have a vision for turning ComeAlong into a business, and to accomplish this I've been trying to treat it like a real business. This week I created emails for myself and the business (say hi to ben@comealong.app) so I could start creating accounts and organizations on platforms like GCP, Github, Microsoft, and Linkedin. To flesh out the business I dedicated a decent amount of time to creating the graphic designs for ComeAlong by choosing the color scheme, creating the logo, and a few other useful things. I'm quite proud of how it has come out so far, and I'm excited to see where it goes.
For the past few months an idea for a mobile app has been taking shape in my head and this project is the result of those ideas coming to fruition. For anyone who doesn't know who I am, I'm Bennett Taylor, a 22 year old software engineer and graduate computer engineering student at Boston University. I've spent the past month volunteering in Zimbabwe, and want to spend the rest of my summer working on ComeAlong before school starts again in the fall. Ultimately, the goal of this project is to build an app that can record, share and find "things to do" in your area, so that you can find something fun to do with either by youself or with friends. I'm not the best writer, so please bear with me while I feebily attempt to communicate my thoughts, ideas, and journey.
The motivation behind building this app really comes from two different places:
The frustration with finding things to do when I'm bored comes is pretty self explanatory - there aren't really any good ways to find all the fun things to do in your area. Google gives shit results, and the only other services/apps mostly just provide a gateway to actvities that businesses near you offer. There's a lack of creativity and fun in the options provided. I want to create a space where any idea for an activity can be shared - even if it's something as stupid as shopping cart jousting or simple as a walk on a little known path.
The strongly held belief that mental health is significantly improved by doing things in the real world with friends comes from both my own experience and research. On the personal side, I struggled in highschool with anxiety and feeling isolated, often because I didn't know how to approach doing things with other people. A lot of my friendships remained surface level and I spent a lot of time alone on my phone. During college I met new friends who helped me come out of my shell and realize the importance and ease of doing things with friends; I realized It really doesn't take that much effort to reach out and plan something to do. There's a lot of great articles that talk more in depth and with more authority about anxiety caused by social media than I would be able to provide, so I'll just leave some links here:
For research regarding the benefits of doing things in the real world with friends, I found a lot of papers talking about the importance of in person social interaction and your environment:
This project is going to be a huge learning experience for me, as my background is mostly in C programming, with a few other various skills from different projects I've worked on while in college. This is also by far the biggest and most complex project I've ever taken on, and I know there are a lot of different skills I'll need to learn and apply to this project. One of my first goals for this project is to create a website that I can show people that are interested in ComeAlong while it is being developed. Knowing this, I decided to really delve into learning HTML and CSS, so most of this week was spent learning how to properly structure HTML and use CSS to style it. A lot of learning about fonts, responsive design, media embedding, and so much more. In the past I learned the very basics of HTML and CSS, but didn't really know them at all, so of course I put them on my resume lol. Needless to say, after this week I feel a lot more confident in my ability to build a website.
While the bulk of the work this week was spent learning HTML and CSS, I also spent a lot of time researching the different frameworks and cloud providers that I could potentially use to build the app. My first decision was to reduce the scope of the project to only target iOS for the time being. This was a difficult decision, as I would have liked to build for both iOS and Android, but I felt that it would be too much to handle for me to build for both platforms at the same time given that I've never developed an app before. My own phone is an iPhone, so it made more sense to build for that platform first, so swift and swiftUI it is. To keep the development of the website quick and easy, I decided to use Next.js, React, Tailwind CSS, and GCP hosting (which I'm familiar with from my work at BU and the chosen cloud provider for the whole project, which I'll get to). The website is not the focus of ComeAlong, so I don't mind using frameworks that I'm less familiar with if I can reduce the code and complexity. For the backend I decided to use GCP because I've used it before for my cloud computing course, and it has everything I need to build the app I want (mature map services, cloud functions, serverless hosting, firebase, etc). Lastly I'm deciding to use Django for the app's API calls because a guy on a flight told me that real businesses use it instead of flask.