From idea to MVP in 24 hours. Here's how

Hey. We have created a small project that some of you may find useful for your personal growth & learning. In this post, I want to cover some details on how we built it, including technical stuff.

https://devblogs.co/

1. Idea

So, the idea came to me naturally. I was just sitting and reading some blogs and started thinking about how to aggregate them to one page. The first thought was RSS, but I don't want to register an account on a new service or download any software. For me, it's much better to add a URL into my browser's bookmarks or just to remember the site address. So I've decided to build my own aggregator.

2. Research & defining MVP

I started gathering information. First, I googled for existing projects similar to mine and didn't find anything. There're some aggregators of links to those blogs, but not blog posts aggregators.

After that, I defined MVP: I quickly chosen 6 blogs that I want to see on my site, and started building.

3. Building

Usually, I use this stack for my apps: NuxtJS, Serverless Node, Firebase/AWS, Heroku.

Of course, I can use PHP for the backend, in which I have more experience, instead of Node, but then I have to think about deploying & scaling the API by myself, instead of doing it automatically with AWS or Firebase.
I quickly built a lambda function that gets posts from RSS into DynamoDB. After that, I built lambda for getting those posts.

It was my first time using DynamoDB and started getting problems with it. It's a key-value store and you cannot do a lot of things that you can do in document-oriented storage or relationship databases. Or even if you can, it's not obvious and requires tricky workarounds. That's why I do not recommend to use if you're not a professional developer, probably you will just be stuck at some point.

I would recommend Firebase, their API and documentation are much easier and you can build faster.

After that, I quickly built front-end using Nuxt and Bulma and deployed the app to Heroku.

That's it. I'm very happy with the results, even if the project won't succeed I got amazing experience on launching my own app from scratch, and that's a good item for my portfolio.

Feel free to ask any questions, and I appreciate any feedback.