A wild ride

I started this project with an intention of creating Doggo Bot, service which would share the amazingness of dog pictures with the world. And although the first week went swimmingly, the rest… not so much. 😅

In the beginning of Week 2 Bennie, the Doggo Bot mascot and inspiration behind the whole project, had to undergo emergency surgery. 😢 This led to a rather strong anxiety about the whole situation and I wasn’t really able to progress with the project for a couple of days. Thankfully the surgery was a success and Bennie started feeling better. Bennie sleeping post-surgery

After all of this nothing stops me from working on the project, right? Wrong!

Because of an extreme amount of coincidence, my employer discussed a similar application to what I was building with a client, which resulted in a conflict of interest between all parties. So for the next couple of day I was preoccupied with resolving the mess that this whole situation caused, which stifled my progress on the project, not to mention the fact I couldn’t post updates due to the Non-disclosure agreement.

However, I have to give kudos to my employer for handling the situation in a professional manner. (Thanks Kate!) We ultimately decided on licensing my solution as a product core for the client application which will save time and budget and ironically me working on this beforehand gives us an amazing competitive edge as not many other companies can say they have a premade solution for a dog image sharing platform powered by Machine Learning. 😅

So because of this unbelievable turn of events my application can now become a “real” app and hopefully touch the hearts of many more people than what I could do by myself, which is ultimately what matters most, as such I decided to mark the project as completed, despite the fact it went in a completely different direction than I originally envisioned.

A wild ride indeed. 🙂

Project setup

I was thinking a lot about the best way to approach setting up the web.

Ultimately I settled on using Gatby.js with a custom template, as I feel it gives me the fastest production value and is scalable if needs to be. (At least for my use cases)

I also set up the whole deployment strategy, website hosting and DNS magic, so I can easily release the newer versions of the web with only one click. 🎉

Side note:
I finished the Week 1 tasks a bit early so I spent the extra day yesterday by creating the Day9tv Web Optimizer. More details can be found in my other project here: https://day9.tv/dk30/project/5eacaf493c51507353f52e94

Mobile designs complete

The mobile designs are now in a state where I am ok with how they look. I am still not fully sold on the design, but I guess I need to play with it in a real browser and iterate as necessary.

I am really looking forward to custom animations & easter eggs I’ll put there. This time next week I might even have a prototype page done.

Homepage

How it works

Doggo+

FAQ / Privacy Policy / Terms of Use

Settings

Menu

Desktop designs complete

Finally got to completing the designs. The settings page still needs some love, but I will iterate on it, once I get to choosing a time picker, maybe I will even add more options.

I want to add some nice animations but I am not sure how to do it effectively without being obtrusive.

Homepage / How it works

Doggo+

FAQ

Privacy Policy / Terms of Use

Settings

Alpha version of Desktop Dashboard (ft. Ben). All feedback is welcome.