PPE Practice

Very close to having the MVP finished. Spent the weekend working on a landing page and wiring up Stripe. Question bank is ready to go, the main features of the app are working, and looks decent enough.

Over the next week I plan on focusing my efforts on tidying things up and then getting some initial users to try it out.

I finally had some free time and motivation to pick this project up again. One of the most time consuming aspects of this side-project is not coding, but compiling a bank of questions to draw upon in the app. I decided that this particular task was not worth my time, so I have been paying a few different writers to come up with questions about topics and references that I send. So far it has worked out well, with over nearly 300 questions created.

To make it easy on everyone, I wrote a script in golang that will populate the firestore database from a csv file. That way my content writers can input questions in an excel sheet, which I can then quickly upload.

I got busy in my main job, and put this aside

In October I made my first commit to a new repository and starting scaffolding some code. I decided to write the app in Angular, mostly because I am familiar with it and can get something functioning pretty quickly. I also learned that I am a terrible designer. This thing was UGLY. For the backend, I used firebase for its generous free tier and ease of integration. User accounts, hosting, database are all from firebase.

In August I began preparing to write the NPPE exam as part of my application for becoming a professional engineer. The very first thing I did was search for practice questions, but to my dismay, there were very limited options.

I continued on and studied with the resources I had, and passed the exam in September. But I made a mental note of the potential for a simple product to help people like me.