This week I did nothing that I planned on doing last week. Rather, I started work on the conversations feature. Mainly, I started implementing websocket support in the app. Up to now, everything has been REST api calls to the backend. But for things like conversations, presence (whether or not someone is online, offline, idle, or in some other state), unread tracking, and notifications, using websockets for real-time communication sent from the server is a must.

As such, this week probably doesn't have as many screenshots as in the past week, because most of the work was not visible, UI, work.

I feel like I wasted (squandered, blew) part of this week, yet I still managed to accomplish my goals. I need to be less judgemental about myself. Everything I had planned to do was finished, and I also worked on an idea for a newsletter (more on that below.) I also woke up "late" a couple days (5:30 instead of 4:30) and right now, the day where we welcome daylight savings time back into our lives, I am sitting down and writing at 6:20 in the morning. Very late, indeed! But it is all ok. I can't even tell myself that "setbacks are ok, they are bound to happen," because there were no setbacks! So why do I feel that I could have been more productive this week? Perhaps I could, though I try to reject this "productivity culture" that hurts America, the thoughts still seep in.

This week was a lot of positive progress. No major technical issues came up that impeded my work (until the end with the markdown editor, but I'll get to that in a bit). I am waking up consistently at 4am every day, and most days I am able to work until 7 or 7:30am before I have to switch off to do paying work, or family obligations, or other things. Being able to get enough time to actually put toward this project is a big concern for me. Staying motivated to continue to work on it, and being able to fit in the time to work on it.

As we continue down the development path of Big Picture, I think it will be a good practice to post weekly progress updates, a "stand-up" as it were. It will help me look back and see the decisions and progress that I make week to week, and it will help show different aspects of the project as it gets more and more mature.

I don't really know how long it will take to get to an MVP for Big Picture. But, in my head, I have September as a goal. I'm not sure how realistic that is. On some days I wake up thinking there is no way I could make that. Other days I feel like I will have an MVP version done long before that.

September or not, though, these stand-up posts will help chart the progress as I work.

The below updates constitute more than a week's worth of work. These recent changes probably represent closer to 2-3 weeks worth of work. I've been working on this project for a couple months now (since the first of December, really), so there are a lot of technical decisions already made that I've not covered in blog posts. But since this is the first "stand-up" post, there is more to cover this week than there will be in future weeks.

Organizations today manage their projects and work items in software like Jira, GitHub, Monday.com, Basecamp, AirTable, Asana, and more. Then they communicate about those work items in software like Slack, MS Teams, Discord, Google Chat, and WhatsApp. Companies have built integrations between all these applications, so a mention of a ticket in Slack can turn into a link to Jira. But the integrations are limited, and most importantly, the knowledge about the project being worked on becomes fragmented. In this example, the details of the issue are in Jira, but the conversation about the issue is in Slack.

Between the project management application, the communication application, the document management application (like Confluence, Sharepoint, Notion, GitHub Wiki (and other Wikis), GitLab, or more), and then even the source code control service itself (GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket), knowledge about a project becomes fractured. To find out the history of a work item, or a project, or the current state, or the latest documentation, a person may have to bounce between a dozen different applications and search inside every one of them before they can get a clear view of a project. A “Big Picture” as it were.

Hello and welcome to Big Picture. My name is Patrick Burrows and I will be your host through this Journey to Production™.