MVP Journey - André Baltazar

Building an MVP every week

📝 Daily Log – The Start – Day 1

As fate would have it I'm off to an awful start... So today I'm starting my first MVP.

I have had this idea for a while of managing streams of data. You can send data into a pipe, and it basically processes, filters, and outputs something. It can also perform tasks based on that data. This idea evolved into a more generic concept where programs could store data into a system where everyone could do computations on that data. Then I came to the realization that it looks a lot like the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) where the data is accessible and the contracts are able to operate over that data.

While this idea was still brewing in the back of my mind, I moved on from it, but then came across someone who was wanting to notify people based on certain things they would subscribe. I thought this could be a great use for a pipe as I wanted to develop. Basically you would put a notification message in. It would filter based on what you wanted and do some tasks on it. It looks a lot like IFTTT, but I wanted to make it focused on notifications and filtering. Then came the realization I could do something else.

The idea of building a notifications project. I already have a project before that allows people to register for notifications and then send notifications to that endpoint, for solo developers, for example, if they to get notifications of errors or something else. It was a failure, but I think I could make it work with a different approach and different target group.

So the final idea is simple: "Build a generic notification system that end-users (public) can subscribe to get updates". The updates can come from different channels, via browsers Push API, Telegram, email, etc. The people providing the subscribe button have a page that they can use to send notifications. And a simple API as well. I can also provide a simple page for people to redirect their audience to and subscribe to get updates from them.

I know, I know... Notifications trigger for some people. However, there are some good uses for them and discarding all those because of the bad is not what should be done (like it happens in a lot of different things). The idea is that you know if you subscribe to this you will get the notifications. There is no other purpose for those buttons.

The reason this was delayed is that my MacBook Pro broke and had to go into warranty. That was a bit of a setback because I wasted a couple of hours each day to get it to the shop/from the shop, and ended up slacking a lot with other things as well, like my Pi Cluster: