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What should I add for a professional reference on my job app?

There's not an app for that

  • I wanted an app, thought there would be a bunch of options, I can't find any. Educate me on the realities of getting an app built. I'm not a total tech noob but I am not a programmer. My idea is basically a database of a certain thing, structurally very similar to recipes (photo, ingredients, instructions), but in case it's not obvious the actual content is not food or recipes. The core functionality would be: The "recipes" could be sorted/searched/browsed on categories and tags. The user can mark which ones they want to do today/tomorrow/next week, the app would then provide a list of all the ingredients needed for the day/week. Recipes can be marked as favorites or as already tried. There's a lot more that would be nice to also add in the lines of adding custom recipes, adding user tags and photos to existing recipes, journaling and sharing via social media. I have a lot of experience with data, metadata, UI design and system development processes (functional specifications, user stories, etc.). I am passable with graphics (good if not particularly creative eye), and have some support in this area from family. I have an expert content producer. I'm pretty darn sure the idea is solid and has a decent potential user base -- if done well. But I have NO idea what kind of investment in time or money it might take to get to a finished app. My main question is, how crazy is it for a Jo Blow (me) to try and get an app developed? What kind of financial outlay might I be looking at? What kind of time would this require (assuming I'm doing most of the project management, functional design, testing and some content creation) -- is this more in the range of a hobby/part time job/full time job? Is this potentially worth all of this trouble?

  • Answer:

    Since you're not getting any answers, I'll give it a go. Not crazy. eLance or similar $10,000 Lots of time but could be hobby. No, prob not.

pennypiper at Ask.Metafilter.Com Visit the source

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The first question to ask is whether it really needs to be usable offline. If not, just make a website that looks good on mobile, tablet, whatever.

rhizome

Once in a while, https://news.ycombinator.com/news will have stories and discussions about someone learning to code by doing their first project. That might be helpful to you. I will also suggest you look for an open source app that has similar functionality and see if you can't get a Minimum Viable Product working by fiddling with that (even if you wind up scrapping that and writing it from scratch later). Minimum Viable Product or MVA is a term you could search on Hacker News. That's the thing you are going to want to shoot for: Something that does one basic thing, without all the bells and whistles, but actually functions when it does that thing. Bells and whistles can be added later. Modifying someone else's source code to try to get the thing to do what you want is likely to be tons easier than coding your first thing from scratch and it's a good way to start learning. Whether it is a hobby, part-time job, or full time job is partly up to you, partly up to market forces. You can decide whether or not monetizing it is important to you and work on making it fit a part time schedule or work on making it financially support full time dedication, as you see fit. Though, really, a single app is not typically full time long term. From what I gather, it typically becomes one of several apps plus some consulting supporting the coder.

Michele in California

You could certainly do most of this with Drupal without having to write any code.

rachelpapers

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