Projects

Yesterday I successfully completed my 7-day programming challenge working on MembershipNerd. I had set out to start a new project, and work on it at least 30 minutes for seven consecutive days.

How did I do?

I tracked 10.5 hours of work on MembershipNerd during those seven days. That is exactly three times the minimum of 3.5 hours that I had set as a goal for myself.

On top of that, I also wrote five blog-posts about the progress or particular problems I was having:

Today I replaced MembershipNerd’s default django user model with a custom user model, in order to authenticate user’s by their email, not some username. The reason for this should be obvious: The primary purpose of MembershipNerd is to allow people to sign-up for updates via email. So we definitely need their email address. Anything else is optional.

The django-improved-user library that I am using provides the following user attributes (besides the django permissions, groups etc.):

When I started working on MembershipNerd this morning I immediately realized that I had overestimated yesterday’s progress. For example, I had not verified that the app is actually using the database, because I thought my start-up script was taking care of that. (And it does, once everything is set up correctly…) Also, when I tried to log in into the django admin, I saw that the css was not loading correctly. Another thing that I had not checked yesterday.

I started my 7-day challenge with a quick planning and task breakdown session. That took me about 10 minutes, but I felt it would be worth it. I don’t have data to confirm if this actually makes me more productive, but taking a few minutes for planning and task breakdown definitely makes me feel more productive and focused.

The User Stories

• US1: As a website visitor I want to be able to easily and securely subscribe and unsubscribe in order to receive updates via email.
• US2: As a project owner I want to be able to create a series of drip-emails that are automatically sent to subscribers when they subscribe, in order to keep my subscribers engaged with my project.

I didn’t really feel the need to add more details or acceptance criteria, because I have those mostly in my head already. It felt more productive to proceed with a quick task breakdown for the first story, and then immediately get working on it.

Tomorrow, I will start working on MembershipNerd as a personal project for my 7-day challenge. I want to create MembershipNerd as a self-hosted alternative for newsletter-services like Mailchimp. My reasons for creating MembershipNerd is that I think almost every side-project, however small, needs a way to

1. let people signup for updates via email (including the ability to unsubscribe)
2. let you, as the project owner, manually send out updates (via email) to your “subscribers”
3. let you, as the project owner, create and send out a series of automated messages (drip campaigns)

These are the core features.