Next User Interface (mockups)

Full Stack Software Development Blog

The next thing to do is to come up with the mockups for the web pages.

I am not a UX nor a UI designer. In fact, I'm terrible at it. My artistic skills do not go beyond drawing stick men. I can get away with poor user experience because

1. I'm working for free
2. Only about 100 people will ever use the application.

Bootstrap will go a long way to making my web pages look nice and work properly. It has some decent UI components (buttons, icons, ...) and it is responsive so it will look good on different sized devices (mobile, tablet and laptop).

Time for me to take a deep dive into Bootstrap 4.

Agile Personas And Stories

Full Stack Software Development Blog

A few months back I brought together several players and we had an agile discovery for the next version (v2) of the application.

The players represented a good cross section of the personas of the users of the application.

Lots of post-its which resulted in epics, which resulted in stories.

I'm using Trello for managing the stories. In the past I deployed Jira to Heroku but decided that was overkill - Trello should be sufficient.

Here's a link to the Trello board before any development...

https://trello.com/b/j1CmXjB4/texas-toc-v2

When the time come to start the first sprint I'll copy the board which will keep a history.

Refactor My Poker League Application

Full Stack Software Development Blog

I play in a poker league. We play a 52 week season. The group has not missed a game in over 12 years (I joined 11 years ago). Presently I have a Java/Spring/MySQL/JQueryMobile application that I wrote in 2014.

Time to blow the dust off the app and refactor to use up-to-date software. I use this as my reference application when interviewing (and I'll be interviewing in later this year).

Will be refactoring from
   Spring 3.x/MySQL/Velocity/JQueryMobile
to
   Spring Boot 2.x/Postgres/Angular

To see the running application visit https://www.texastoc.com
To see the source code visit https://github.com/gpratte/texastoc

The app does thing like:

• Allows guest to view the site and obfuscates names and dollar amounts
• Add players to a game
• Mark players that finish in the top 10 of a game
• Calculates payouts in a game
• Randomly seat the players before each game and text players their table/seat
• Game clock for the rounds and text those who have opted in then a round changes
• Tracks seasons (games, quarterly seasons, season results, top ten lists)
• Emails asking for the weekly host
• Emails asking who will transport the supplies
• FAQ
• ...

It is time to refactor to

Spring Boot for the backend
Progressive web app using Angular for the front end
Bootstrap for a nice HTML look and feel
Many new features