JungleDragon development - year 2 »
FERDY CHRISTANT - AUG 13, 2009 (06:25:41 PM)
It's been six weeks since I last did any development on project JungleDragon. There was the summer break, a trip to South Africa and I generally needed to recharge the batteries. Combining a project like this with a demanding day job and social life is hard.
It is fun too though, in fact is a healthy obsessionpassion. Therefore I'm starting year two of JungleDragon development as of now. The first year I focussed on the following:
- The idea itself, working out the concepts, scope and positioning
- Translating this into a technical design
- Working on major backend parts such as the data model, data access layer, karma-engine, authentication and registration module, etc.
- Implementation of image storage engine (image slicing, EXIF parsing, Amazon S3 integration)
- The end-to-end implementation of basic functionality such as profile editing, image uploading, registration, image viewing, the comment system and more.
- Acquiring new skills needed for this project:
- CodeIgniter framework (the PHP framework I use)
- jQuery
- Web application scalability
- Web usability
As you can image, the first year had quite some startup overhead. Luckily, this now enables me to move faster. Before I continue feature development though, I will first move one step back in order to move two forward. The current JungleDragon design (page layout, CSS) has been polluted over the last year and I'm not happy with it. Instead of building on a messy visual base I'm going back to the drawing table for the design. I intend to rebuild the design from scratch outside my code base and then later integrate it back into the project.
That should keep me occupied for a few weeks. After that, it's back to feature development. The list of work to do is huge, but I'm ready and excited. After all, this is a mission of years. If you wish to support my project, please visit this page, which contains a donation button.
