Need help ? Ask me anything ! 🙂 I have been writing software for the last 13 years. #AMA
Hello Indie Hackers community 👋
I am quite new to the community in terms of contributions so I thought I could use my expertise to help some of you if anyone needs it.
Having issues with your apps, APIs or web applications ? or just don't know where to start to build your new MVP or which tech stack to use ? I can help and set you in the right direction. Hit me up, I am an open book :)
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Do you implement your own auth or integrate 3rd party services like firebase?
If you use 3rd party services which one would you recommend?
Hey Andrew :) I implement my own auth and user management system, regardless of the programming language or framework I am working with since the underlying concepts are the same, but when it comes to adding social media log-ins and sign-ups I use Firebase since it is a lot faster to use and configure, it keeps all the configuration in one single place where I can easily enable and disable them.
I recommend using Firebase in that case, for social login-ins/sign-ups, because of its ease of use. Does that answer your question ?
Yes, thank you!
Any books you would recommend to become a better developer?
Hello Steven :) to become a better developer I would not recommend a book, since books tend to often have outdated code that you can't easily run even if they have GitHub references in them.
My recommendation is to build a solid computer science foundation, including a good understanding of algorithms complexity and development, network/web protocols and how they work, the reason being, that theoretical foundation will be the same across every language you decide to use and work with, wether it is a dynamically typed language like Python or statically typed like Java, C++ or C#.
In addition reading and studying the documentations of the programming language and frameworks you use will really give you an edge and allow you to code without continuously relying on it.
I'll share you with you a trick I use to really understand any programming language I learned or decide to learn, I initially code on a piece of paper, I just close down my machine, and code with pen and paper to force my self to truly understand how all the difference pieces of my codebase and then run in my head, literally, I imagine how it would run from the initial execution in the entry point to how an object or variable might change or be allocated in memory for example.
Thanks for the reply. I wasn’t thinking about technical books, I was thinking about more generalist books on coding. I recently read The Pragmatic Programmer and I thought it was very helpful. Thanks for your advice too.
I am not very familiar with generalists books unfortunately, but The Pragmatic Programmer looks quite captivating from what I can see, I'll check it out as well :) Feel free to ask anything else you need Steven.
Hey can you build a giant no code platform for idiots who cant code?
What are you having difficulties with ? Perhaps I can help, but just like every skill it needs total focus, time and sacrifice to get really good at it.
I'm so insecure about flurly. What do you think about it?
What are insecure about ? are you talking about the design, implementation, security level ? Tell me more
I would ask, how do I measure the size of the first MVP for my product? I always find myself building side features that I consider important. Is auth a side feature? Because that alone took me 2 weeks to implement (considering Stripe subscriptions).
Auth isn't usually a side feature, depending on what you are building, since you need a way to identify your users, but 2 weeks is a lot of time just for that, it shouldn't take more than a few ours to have an authentication system implemented, how did you build it ? I am trying to understand your approach.
2 weeks to implement with integration tests. Should one ditch testing when building MVPs?
Definitely not, you need to make sure that all is working as it should but being an MVP things are bound to change quickly, what did you use to build the auth system ? Was it built all from scratch? 2 weeks for the auth system seems to be too long and the testing can't be the reason behind the timeline
I would suggest to weight the amount of effort and time it takes to QA manually vs Writing integration tests, if it's quicker to do, manual QA is sometimes the way to go, it's one of the luxury of an MVP, you can afford to launch just with manual QA, a lot of what you build now is very like to change sooner than later and putting a lot of effort into integration and unit tests at this stage is an expensive endeavour.