You get better at something by practicing. You gain a better understanding by teaching and sharing. I’ll be combining these ideas by blogging my activities practicing the craft of web development. I plan to build a simple project every few months to explore new areas and technologies and grow my knowledge and experience.

My first project will be a utility tracker. I want to be more aware of our utility usage and tracking it will be a good way to increase my awareness.

My plan is to create a single page app that leverages offline storage and syncs with a Rails back end. I’ve thought about adding push notification as a reminder to take measurements and I’m sure that charting would be good to have but the first thing is just to get a simple app out and usable.

Capabilities of my MVP will be:

  1. Select a utility
  2. Enter a value
  3. Save the value
  4. View a list of saved values

Initially it will not be backed by a persistent storage. This let’s me avoid server-side services and any kind of user login. I may add support to export and import data to enable some kind of rudimentary self storage, but my initial goal is to keep it simple.

A followup blog post will discuss the technologies I’m considering and talk through why I’m planning on using what I’m planning on using. I may pick something that’s not as appropriate as something else. I may encounter issues and change my approach. We will have to see as we go. In any case I will keep the repository public and discuss approaches, issues, and resolutions here.