The Project Roadmap

May 19, 2021 – From POC to MVP

As mentioned in my previous post, the app I'm going to build for this project is called StarLog. It will be a fairly simple stargazing journal, allowing the user to keep track of what they saw in the night sky, when they saw it, and any other fun details about their observations.

For a proof-of-concept app, I'm not going to be too concerned about things like user accounts and persistent data storage. I just want to be able to interact with a screen in a web browser. The UI doesn't have to be fancy, either. A simple CRUD interface will do.

What would be considered a minimal viable product, then? To reach MVP, I'll want a user to be able to log in, save their observations to a database, and load them again in a new session. I'd also like to have a database-backed list of astronomical objects to choose from when making entries in the journal.

From there, I could imagine the app being improved in a number of ways. Fancier UI elements, additional fields for the observations with more complex data relationships, maybe an interactive star chart that plots the locations of each entry visually across the night sky.

But that's getting a bit ahead of myself. In the meantime, I'll focus on choosing the right technology stack and start getting some code written.