Pharmacy POS
A modern point of sale application for pharmacies in Romania
Due to a lot of stuff happening IRL, I couldn't do much work on the project. We've missed 2 developer meetings already so I'm not sure what everybody else has been doing. Our frontend engineer should have been working on a prototype based on a simple wireframe I made... I guess we'll see. There's no hurry.
I've been playing around with different UI toolkits for React though, trying to see how each of them would fit my vision for the UI and UX. I created different Next.js projects integrating these various toolkits and tried building the same UI in each of them.
Blueprint seemed the slowest to get started with, due to its extremely modular design and lack of layout system (I had to integrate with Tailwind). There are no templates readily available for it so I had to try a lot of different combinations to get a layout going (because like I said, there aren't even guidelines for laying out standard UI components and making sure they stay put, like page navbar and sidebar components).
ElementUI (EUI) was really nice looking and has friendly documentation, but support for SSR is kinda of wonky and new, and development reload times are too slow. Might have to give this one a try again without SSR (with a pure React project).
Material UI was the easiest to get started with. It supports SSR out of the box and reload times are super fast. Laying out a UI is fast as well. No to mention that I think its data grid/table component is looking super good and it seems they are investing a lot in its development (with a professional commercial version available as well).
I don't want to waste any more time though, so I might just stick with Material UI because it seems to me that we can move faster with it. If our frontend guy doesn't have anything yet, I'll probably have to write this myself as well and perhaps give it to him for further development so I can switch back to the backend and continue work there.
Another developer is interested in the project and has contacted me.
We exchanged a couple of emails and I told him a few things about the project idea so he can think of a few questions to ask me, when we meet online later today.
I'm super excited to see another developer take interest in the project!
Today I met online with the two developers I talked about before.
The meeting was kind of long but we got to know each-other better.
One of them is a good backend-focused developer and prefers TypeScript over JavaScript (like me!) and the other one is more focused on the frontend side of things, specializing in React.
We planned and decided how to keep track of tasks.
Architectural design for the application has begun. Hopefully this won't take us very long.
Two developers showed interest in my project idea today.
One of them is from Romania and the other one from India.
I talked to both of them in separate online meetings. I explained what I want Pharmacy POS to be, and why I think it can be successful.
Both of them decided they liked the idea so I set up a joint meeting for next week, so we can get to know each other better and learn more about each other's technical strengths.
This idea of building the first set of beautiful, easy to use, modern applications for pharmacies in Romania has been on my mind for a very very long time, almost as long as I have been working in the industry, which is now approaching 10 years.
In those 10 years a lot has changed with the way developers write new applications. I watched closely how frameworks and libraries like jQuery, React, Vue.js, .Net Core, Node.js, and programming languages like JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, C# and technologies like WASM and HTML5/CSS3 ... made writing and deploying complex business applications easier, safer and faster.
I played with some of these technologies but only as a hobby. My work as an IT Manager and Administrator took away a lot of my free time.
So I tried to convince the company I work for to invest in building new software, but they were too scared of failure and huge costs.
I tried to convince our software vendors to rewrite their old software in a modular fashion, by taking out certain aspects of the business and building them as separate applications, but they are not interested because there is no incentive and no competition in the marketplace.
So now I see this as a huge business opportunity.
It's time I took matters into my own hands!
2 Comments
Tech choices can spiral you into a never-ending loop of never shipping. Just pick one (you can always change it later). You can't return the lost time you could have spent talking with your audience.
Thank you for your advice. I think you are right. I should focus on the fast path. But I guess that's what I've been doing here. Trying to find a good (not perfect) fit for the UI in terms of component library. Like I said, I'm sticking with M-UI. But like I also said, a lot of stupid stuff happening IRL has put my work on old (kid's b-day, car breaking down, water pipe bursting, my god... what's next?).
One good piece of news though, is that I got contacted by a software agency interested in the project. I told them about the project and now I'm waiting on their answer. If I could get some professional help with this project to speed things up, it would be phenomenal for me because... I don't want to sound discouraged but, there's an overwhelming amount of work to be done on this project, at least at the current stage of development, and I feel like I need more involved help. Someone with more experience in what it means to ship a new product.