Hello world 👋

Taking the plunge and testing the waters with "indie hacking" (nights/weekends). Going to partner with my kids to build a mobile app (NativeScript + Angular + .net core + Azure). Based on the forecasted temperature range, the app will tell you in a simple way how many layers of clothes would be appropriate. My kids wear shorts on days where it's below freezing, so this should be interesting :)

Process can be a pain. And with a solo project? I guess I could skip process completely and just go. Or I could just go with process I'm familiar with. But hey, I'm working on building a new kind of weather app to jump start professional development, so why not try a new process while I'm at it? Enter "Lean Startup".

Interestingly the Lean Startup agile technique is only coming in as being used by 1% of all respondents in the "State of Agile Report ."

When looking around online for tactics on "how" to work with this technique, it's not so straightforward. The official website seemed to be more about selling books than sharing hands-on tips http://theleanstartup.com/. I don't know, maybe I didn't dig deeply enough?

I did find that Atlassian acknowledges Lean Startup, but only very superficially https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/align/lpm.

All good -- I'm just going to roll with it.

For the weather app I'm working on, I documented plan A using leanstack. It's really interesting because in a few minutes of discussion with my son, I discovered that plan A isn't going to work. He told me that he wouldn't use the app as I had envisioned it. We dove into the problem space and went through pain points together:

• everyone has their own comfort zone (what feels cold to me might not feel cold to him) so he doesn't want to wear a coat just because someone or something told him to
• forecasts can be hard to understand
• mornings are busy

What he told me next really surprised me:

• needs to feel like a game; must be fun with leveling up
• needs to be customizable
• graphics are important

Wait a second, I thought we were building a weather app and now we're building a game?! I'll have to think on that, but one thing that really stood out to me here was the idea of personal temperature profiles. If HE built his own profile, he might trust it and learn to associate the somewhat abstract concept of a temperature number with a feeling of hot or cold. This is starting to feel more like a science class learning tool than a weather app...

It seems like there might be two parallel tracks emerging:

• hammer out the concepts with the concierge MVP model (not actually building the app, to begin with, but rather manually figuring out what the app needs to do)
• put basic infrastructure in place (select architecture, setup basic project template, setup cicd pipeline, plug-in analytics tooling, plug-in feature flipper tooling, etc)

Then once those are basically in place:

• build the minimum feature set to get the app up and going
• then finally continue to iterate as described here: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/62-how-to-build-product-as-a-small-startup

It's actually been harder to get to this point than I thought it would be, but this has been pretty fun so far :)