Polishing your apps
I built DailyWeight about 5 months ago and then never touched the code or even logged into the app since then. I mainly built it just to learn some new things about Rails, and once I had the minimal viable product done I dind’t see a need to work on it any more.
That’s pretty much the approach I’ve taken for a couple of years now with all the new apps I’ve made. I create something to learn something new, and then I abandon the project as soon as I’ve mastered the new skill I was seeking.
I’ve been inspired by Lee Munroe and his ability to ship great looking products that users actually want to use with Flask and CodeShare.
My goal for DailyWeight and a couple other apps that I’ve created is to continue to polish them and get them out of their raw state and into a finished product that people will actually want to use (I actually want to use them too).
I think the easy part is building the prototype, the hard part comes in polishing the app day in a day out even after the initial excitement has left. With software there is no finished product, the finished product actually becomes the small iterations you make on a weekly/monthly basis. No one wants to use an abandoned piece of software that has no support, bug fixes, and new features. Users want to know that your app is living.