Eonzah!

A recent conversation made me contemplate whether it'd be better to change tech stacks. Yet I realized I wanted to have the key functionality in place and tested before adopting something new. I concluded that the existing tech stack should be able to handle the initial burden and workload required to complete various use cases, but I'll definitely need to test this theory...

Winter storm definitely slowed progress, and I finally deployed the much needed update to this site.

This update provides proper giveaway creation (added validation), giveaway pages, username creation (an extension of previous account creation capabilities), and much more. Also updated the SEO for the product site, which didn't previously have any meta tags.

Still so much yet to do.

Well, Digital Ocean is nice for its ease of use, but with it comes a trade off as far as security goes. I'll have to address that at a later date, but I think for MVP purposes, this is perfectly fine and still secure enough. Still, it was a bit disappointing to learn about this limitation.

I successfully deployed the frontend codebase, again using my preferred service provider. I originally intended on using Digital Ocean, as I appreciated their CI/CD service for backend services, but I found Digital Ocean didn't offer SSL for their static sites, which proved a no-go for me.

So I moved back to Netlify, and changed my DNS to Netlify. It's live now. I also learned how to handle redirects for history mode SPAs on Netlify.

The product website was built with Nuxt.js and deployed to Netlify with a custom domain. The domain was purchased days before to establish the necessary domain infrastructure, to include setting up email accounts that can be used for outreach, and related product business accounts for future product development.

Well, I never quite expected a freak winter storm to shut off power for days. That impacted my timeline, and now I'm not sure I'll be able to release my MVP as soon as I had hoped, but I'm going to still try. Rain, sleet, snow, acts of God... Apparently, when you're determined, it doesn't matter. You find ways.

Through the years, I have developed a strong preference for certain frameworks. I'm a huge fan of Vue.js and the related frameworks, primarily Quasar and Nuxt.js. I have come to favor FeathersJS for the backend and have become pretty comfortable with the features it offers. My favorite design frameworks/assets include TailwindCSS and FontAwesome. I've been looking for the right MVP to develop using these combinations of tech. There was a trigger due to an opportunity I saw that I initially dismissed. I'm still not sure it's an opportunity I qualify, but it got me thinking about how I could build an MVP for this idea. Before I knew it, I had a ton of ideas, and I couldn't stop thinking about it. I knew I would have to try. So, I began developing the MVP, using templates from codebases I had already developed through the past few years of experimentation and MVP development for other startups.

Honestly, I don't remember when I came up with this idea. It was sometime after the pandemic hit and pushed everyone inside, perhaps around March or April 2020. I believe sometime after that, Starbucks ran a remotely accessible game to bring customers back to their stores after things started reopening in the summer. It was Starbucks' Stars for Life game that seeded this idea.

I also read that Starbucks' app has proven very successful for them in getting customers back to their stores and increasing their overall revenue. I thought, why should a big corporation like Starbucks be the only one able to come up with such as a contest? Shouldn't small businesses also be able to provide this level of engagement to their customers?

So the idea began churning in my mind.