With the new year approaching I thought of a way to challenge myself ahead of the ’New Years Resolution’. Truth is, I make grand plans every year… I’m sure many do. But, like many, I usually achieve maximum one or two (this site) things for the year.

January usually is my time where I sit and make personal plans for the next 9 months. I deliberately do it like that because I know that the end of the year is usually time to be ill and then it’s Christmas. Having a kid in pre-school makes the ‘ill’ part a more regular thing for us though. Ha!

So, cutting to the juicy details…

I decided that I’m going to challenge myself to create a web app, within the next 60 days. I initially thought of 30 days, but knowing my workload, that would totally burn me out.

For 2018, I want to look at a more passive income from different sources. What better way than using my skills and build stuff. Even if this doesn’t make any income, I will still be happy to have learned on the way. To me, learning is priceless.

I’m going to create a simple appointment web app that allows you to choose a date and time where people can make a booking to meet with you. Useful for events and other gatherings. There are many out there but I find a lot of these are over complicated, mess around with timezones too much and have a super complicated and clunky user interface.

Over the next few days I’ll share more details but here is what I want to achieve on a personal level and obviously the app. In a nutshell:

• Develop a simple to use appointment/scheduling/booking web app.
• Develop this with a MVP, minimum viable product, mindset and improve after launch according to demand.
• Stay true to simple all the way and define the values of the app.
• Motivated by the Micro.blog photo challenge by Doug Lane I want to blog every day with progress.
• Develop the app in the open, except the codebase. This means UI screenshots and other things that will be important to share. I would love for feedback from others if at all possible, which will help me along the way. Perhaps I’ll have a public Trello board so people can chip in on progress.
• Open up a early beta at the 40 day mark.
• And on a personal level, I want to learn, hone and improve my skills with hopefully more projects like this in future.
• Look back at this project and be happy of what I created, failure or not.

There is more I want to achieve with this, but I hope that the above pretty much sums it up.

I already did a few things to get this off the ground earlier in the week. I’ll get posting a little later about what I already did.

If I can launch this late January, then I will be happy. There are many challenges in the way. I also hope that opening this up and letting my followers watch and contribute will be well received. I am planning perks for any beta sign ups and anyone that decides to contribute - I’ll blog about that more.

In the next few days, I’ll define the app and its values.

Happy to start this right now, so here goes.