Personal visa assistant
For many years I've been annoyed of visa getting processes. All forms are the same, but slightly different. All info is stored inconsistently inside a passport and finding arrival stamps is a pain. I want to solve this.
Even thought product is far from ready, I've decided to apply to Y Combinator. Who knows, maybe they would like my idea even at this stage!
Their application form questions are fascinating and answering them helps a lot. I would recommend anyone just to answer this questions, even if they are not planning to apply to YC.
Before finishing MVP, I had planned a schedule for Visas Digital and actually found a name by accident. MVP was really basic at the time, most of the "essential" features were moved to the later stages, such as Beta and Release.
It's really hard to present MVP, since it can do practically nothing, but it's ready anyway, and it is going to be a base for the future releases!
My mac died with an uncommitted backend, so I decided to get rid of it completely!
I've heard a lot about Firebase, but never had a chance to check it out. For the Visas I decided to give it a go and I just fall in love with it.
After a week of fiddling with Firebase, Visas is nearly ready for an MVP release. See you soon!
I've finally figured out how to work with GraphQL and it's wonderful. Also I've learnt how to properly deploy Django+Vue.JS site by accident. I still need to fiddle with some forms and add a few more mutations to my schema, but a bunch of files turns into MVP!
For Visa surf (still not sure about the name) I'm planning to try a slightly more aggressive marketing approach as soon as MVP will be released.
Apparently, if I don't try to create a production-ready project from the start (by that I mean a lot of fiddling with AWS services) and take a step-by-step approach, everything becomes super easy.
Most of the frontend is ready, just a few forms left to do. Backend is pretty much ready, I might need to update my models, but it's easy. I have a few issues with uwsgi and docker, but it's not a dealbreaker, so I can skip solving that for now.
GraphQL works great and I love it! The last step for MVP will be to write a full Schema and connect Frontend with Backend.
Maybe I will fiddle with CloudFront, S3 and other AWS services for a proper deploy, but it's not an essential step.
After a long time I decided to turn my idea into reality, so I started planning out DB models at first. It was easy for me to decide on the frontend, since I love Vue.js so much, but communication and backend were tough cookies.
Initially I didn't want to use Django, since I wanted to make the whole project with Node.js. I've checked multiple similar options for node, but I didn't like them yet, maybe I'll try them in new projects. So in the end I decided to stick with Django, since I know it well.
I decided to add some novelty to my stack and use GraphQL instead of REST.
I fell in love with carrd.co and decided to create a landing page, so I won't forget about my idea. https://visa.alekskuznetsov.com/ is pretty basic, it just collects e-mails, but it's good enough. Right now I'm still mainly working on wish.surf, so this project is stalled temporarily.
I've read so many times that you should solve your own problem, and so last week I sat down to think about all the problems in my life.
It turned out that I had quite a few problems worth solving, and the most interesting one led me to the idea for Visa Surf!
Alex
For many years I've been annoyed of visa getting processes. All forms are the same, but slightly different. All info is stored inconsistently inside a passport and finding arrival stamps is a pain. I want to solve this.