RewoHub - (Part 2) Defining my MVP and next steps

Last week I wrote down my intention to get back into the startup/indiehacker scene in this blog post. The idea is to solve one of my problems, improving our remote retrospectives at work.

I've defined the MVP. It is super slim since I have at most 1-2 hours each day on average. I'm a perfectionist making it challenging for me to avoid self-induced scope creep. The MVP...

• is a WebApp helping distributed teams in collaborating in their retrospectives.
• is a kanban-like board with cards.
• lets users interact with each other via text in the cards.
• will sync changes to the cards to all users.
• will work for up to 10 concurrent users on one board.

That's small and easy, right? As a developer, I'm interested in keeping the things I'm working with as framework/language agnostic as possible, keeping the code reusable and agile. At the same time, I don't want to reinvent the wheel again and again. I'm intrigued by the WebComponents standard. WebComponents are one way of making your code reusable, saving you time in the long run. They integrate well in frameworks like React, Angular, Vue. If I decide to use them later, there won't be a lot of code to rewrite.

After some initial hacking a first offline prototype is done. I like it, for the amount of work I've put into it I'm happy with the result. Not all is well thought. I'm very displeased with some choices in the WebComponent standard. Like CSS and HTML are defined in strings, so no validation by your IDE of choice.

The obnoxious way of mapping attributes and properties together is also not my forte.

A wise man and one of my first mentors told me once: "Look Dodo, I know I'm not the smartest guy in the universe and someone else is bound to have had the same issue. So let's find his solution and rework it to fit our needs." Off I go, search and find Stencil.js which looks like it's ticking all off my boxes. Let's see how fast I can rewrite the application in Stencil.js. This week I will try to find a host for the WebApp and perhaps the most challenging thing of the project, finding a name.