Airdos.net

❓ Why Did I create Airdos

I created Airdos to act as a social media platform for academics. You may be thinking:
"why would you build a social media platform Phillip? They are difficult to create and the idea has been mined nearly to its core by companies like Facebook."
You my nameless reader are correct ✔️ ! Building a social media site is nearly a cliché for a young dev, and it is rather difficult to do well. But as Theodore Roosevelt once said “Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain,[and] difficulty". I was draw to the problem because of how difficult it seemed, and I hoped to learn a tremendous amount as I built (and more likely failed to build) my first social media site.

🏗️ How Did I build Airdos

In the interest of brevity, I will simply post a trimmed version of the package.json from the project itself. Keep in mind, it was a lerna project, so mentally include {"lerna": "^3.21.0"}.

Frontend

{
  dependencies: {
    "apollo-client": "^2.6.9",
    "graphql": "^15.0.0",
    "lodash": "^4.17.19",
    "polished": "^3.6.3",
    "react": "^16.13.1",
    "react-axe": "^3.4.1",
    "react-grid-layout": "^0.18.3",
    "react-hook-form": "^5.6.1",
    "react-router-dom": "^5.1.2",
    "react-window": "^1.8.5",
  },
  devDependencies: {
    "@graphql-codegen/cli": "1.17.6",
    "@testing-library/react": "^10.0.4",
    "cypress": "^4.4.1",
    "husky": "^4.2.5",
    "prettier": "^2.0.5",
    "react-test-renderer": "^16.13.1",
    "styled-components": "^5.1.0",
    "typescript": "^3.8.3",
  },
24}

Backend

{
  dependencies: {
    "apollo-server-lambda": "^2.14.1",
    "aws-sdk": "^2.734.0",
    "lodash": "^4.17.20",
  },
  devDependencies: {
    "eslint": "^7.7.0",
    "nodemon": "^2.0.4",
    "serverless": "^1.72.0",
    "typescript": "^3.9.3",
  },
13}

💡 What Are my takeaways from building Airdos

General takeaways

Plan, plan and plan again, then code. You know that old adage "measure twice and cut once", that surprisingly holds some truth when planning a software project. I repeatedly expanded my MVP as I built, leading to a product that was fully built out in some areas, and weirdly lacking in others, without having any obvious core functionality. Moral of the story, build the MVP first, duh 🤦 .
When working with others make sure everyone understands their role and gives feedback freely to everyone they interact with. I was approached with the idea for Airdos by two friends of mine with no coding experience. Early on we established they would act as product managers and I would be the engineer. For some of you reading this, red flags will be flying in every direction, but I was naive... now I'm slightly more mature and also part of a great facebook group called "I can handle the business side". As it turned out they didn't know how to be product managers at all, and I was too kind/naive to give them the feedback they needed to become better! Always give feedback (in a kind and constructive manner) !

Tech takeaways

Serverless is great, especially for POC's. I saved a ton of money (for a personal project) by not running an EC2 instance's 24/7 to handle my graphql-dynamoDB api. I payed $0 for my servers. We were able to demo to possible clients, and rapidly make changes all for $0. Not that we needed it in the end, but it can scale! In summary, aws lambda is awesome, and I plan on using it more for my frugal escapades in the future.
A11y: its benefits far outweigh its costs. When I was young I decided to try my hand at finance. I was fascinated by the complexity of financial markets and was lucky enough to land an internship at MITIMCo, MIT's $18 billion dollar Endowment.
From day one I discovered what MITIMCo actually does... worship excel. Often I would walk by cubicles with three screen all blindingly white with that characteristic green trim (#008000 if you were wondering).
So I asked myself, why was excel so amazing? Today I can tell you for certain: A11y. The ability to quickly and easily tab through excel, combined with amazing fluid usability, this is what made everyone addicted. Making your site easy to flow through without a mouse, and even without looking at your site will help millions, and its just possible (as was the case with excel) it will make your site addictive and indispensable.