30 — Landed
Today’s Overview
Prepare for landing because we’ve arrived at our destination. It’s the end of day 30 and I’ve finished the new build for Orbitt. Like I mentioned in yesterday’s writing, I had very little remaining work to do before I was finished so I was able to take care of it in just a few hours today. I was able to finish the ‘settings’ page and have a moment of peace.
Everything in the project isn’t 100% perfect. There’s definitely some cleaning up I will need to spend the next week taking care of, but it’s just some refactoring stuff and making the code easier to read. All of the functionality is there and if I needed to demo this as a working MVP, it would work perfectly with no features missing from what I designed.
It feels great to be at this point and now there’s so many things I want to do next. I want to make the app better by adding new features, the code better by cleaning things up. I want to write ore about interesting topics and go more in depth on individual topics. This series of writings helped me get back into and now I have more flow and ideas but i’m not really enjoying writing in this format and about these things anymore.
Don’t get me wrong, doing this was awesome and it did what I intended for it to do. But it served its purpose and i’m ready to move on. I want to do thorough research on topics and spend lots of time in deep work and take my time putting together writings with all of the thoughts and ideas I have during those time periods. I just want the writing to feel more inspired. I kept going with all 30 of these writings because I wanted to keep my word to myself and I knew I just needed to do it to get back in the habit of writing and exercising those parts of my brain again. But there was a lot of times I didn’t want to do the writing. I didn’t find what I worked on on some particular days that interesting to write about or I didn’t want to stop writing code and would be forcing myself to do the writings. But my commitment was for 30 days = finished rebuild with 30 writings documenting the 30 days that I did the work in. So I kept it pushing. Even at times I didn’t want to complete the writing because I felt I needed to spend more time making it better, but I didn’t have the time because the delivery of the project had a deadline too. Just keep moving. Keep writing. Keep building. All done by September 30th. That was the mentality. I didn’t say write 30 of the best articles ever, just 30 articles and a delivered product in 30 days.
Thinking about it, I probably could’ve gotten the whole thing done in 2 weeks if I really focused in and ignored everything in my life besides my project. No writings and putting them together, no exercising, no time with family and friends, etc. But, I also could’ve let this take much longer than it needed to. Committing to getting it done in one month with 30 writings to document the entire process forced into action at all times and also let me know that in one months time I would:
- Have the new design and rebuild of Orbitt that it desperately needed
- Have written 30 articles to help me get back into writing
- Have written documentation about the development of my project to go along with the design case study
Setting deadlines really works. I’m a pretty disciplined person and stay pretty focused. I would’ve definitely gotten this project done and relatively quickly. But this one month could’ve easily turned into two. And instead of having 30 writings to document every day, it could’ve easily turned into 5 over the course of a month. They might’ve been better, more thorough, and more in depth because I would’ve only written on the days I felt inspired and had something to share but that’s fine because that’s where I am now. The sprint of the last month helped me better understand what I want to do, how I want to do it, who I want to do it with, etc. It’s given me mental clarity. It feels like I went through a process and it wasn’t too long to where the experience gets split into separate ones and it wasn’t too short to where it doesn’t have that big of an impact/feeling of like a process and era of experience. It’s an interesting topic I want to think about more and implement in my life. Setting goals for completing things that are (for the most part) in my control by a certain deadline. Letting the deadline be ambitious, but not too ambitious. To where I won’t make the deadline if I slack off and don’t make sacrifices, but i’m also not feeling anxious and behind all of the time. I can take the time to get the details right and have calm work sessions putting better energy into my work than anxiety. Which also helps in the end and is another thing I learned is that setting deadlines for things when you don’t have someone setting them for you can really help you keep that feeling of progression and feeling like you’re doing the right things. Without goals and deadlines to hit them, life can turn down for a lot of reasons. Goals without deadlines either never happen or you never really know if you should feel good about where you are because did it take you too long to get there? Are you close but now you have a new goal? Or you just lose the “intensity” needed to keep progressing. That feeling of deadline coming lights a fire under you and keeps you locked in. It just gave me something to wake up and work towards every day and it feels good thinking about where you’re going to be at the end of the month when you’ve done what you committed to doing. It gives you something to work towards and stay disciplined for, and allows you to feel like you exactly earned some rest for a moment. You just sprinted and went to war for the last month, take a day off and enjoy it.
I’m talking a lot about myself right now. But, as I got going on this writing I just fell into thinking about what I learned from this project and just kind of what’s going through my head. Wanting to put my thoughts down and make sense of them and show a lesson and how I learned it. A wise man once said “write for yourself, not others” meaning the best writing comes from when you’re just letting your own mind free on what it wants to write rather than thinking about what you should say in order to do what you think will please an audience. And instead of giving a writing like: ‘5 things I learned from…’ (I still might do this actually but only if 5 authentic things I really want to write about really come to mind) I just wanted to show what I learned and putting it into words in this writing for the first time. It feels so much better and the writing just has a much more authentic flow and feel to it when you just write what’s on your mind. Trying to follow all of the rules around what you *should* do to get those ideas out *correctly* waters down the message.
I say all that to say I don’t know exactly what I am going to do next and what my exact goal is going to be for the end of this next coming month, but I’m going to figure that out and get going on it. Orbitt will be heavily involved somewhere but I just don’t know exactly how. I’m going to continue writing but I don’t know about what. I’ll probably get back on Twitter and do more short-form writing there.
In any case, the last thing to share is some mockups of the fully developed application to show how it came out. I’ll probably share videos and demo it through other channels soon but for now i’m just going to share the visual design. I’ll be sharing the Figma mockups next to the developed project so you can see how the 2 compare. All of the mockups and screenshots are at desktop size with the design mockup being shared first and then the screenshot of the coded and developed page following it. See below:
Dashboard Page — Design Mockup
Dashboard Page — Developed Project
Customers Page — Design Mockup
Customers Page — Developed Project
Customers Page (Add Customer) — Design Mockup
Customers Page (Add Customer) — Developed Project
Customers Page (Customer Selected) — Design Mockup
Customers Page (Customer Selected) — Developed Project
Rewards Page — Design Mockup
Rewards Page — Developed Project
Messages Page — Design Mockup
Messages Page — Developed Project
Process Transaction — Design Mockup
Process Transaction — Developed Project
Settings Page — Design Mockup
Settings Page — Developed Project
Right off the bat on the first page (dashboard), you can see that there are some differences in the charts. There was some limitations with the resource I am using and and it’s going to take some work but I think i’m going to be able to get it looking a lot more similar to what I have in the design mockups. As for the rest of the pages though, everything is looking good and pretty much identical. And functioning that way as well. If anyone would like to try the product out, please reach out to me and let me know. Email me at brandonrodriguez100@outlook.com.
I’m excited to have it all done and now I just want to get going on what’s next for it. I can implement new ideas and push myself and I just have to wrap this month up and think about it more because i’m looking forward to it. This has been a great experience. Until next time!
