Defining and releasing a MVP

I have started so many different features but have not really finished much to my likeing .

The dictionary does not have pagnation. The Anime Serires and deck pages are hard to navigate. Kana study is a copy of Kanji study and it does not quite fit. There seems to be quite a few things that are not really adding up to the product that I wanted to create and not to mention many things that are still just in my imagination.

As I am developing this application I find myself jumping from feature to feature making small improvements as I go on each page without finishing any individual piece itself. This is left the application to be a low quality. I’ve created more of a mess than I have created more of a product and that has kept me away from development for a few months. Overtime I continued this messy development strategy and it’s worked out to the point where I have a few things that I can release and I’ve created an open alpha.

From now on, I need to prioritize one feature at a time find what’s not done with it and focus on that in individual branches in my code. This is the plan from now on.

They’re quite a few reasons why I actually I have been a way from development of Sakuryo.

One, the application didn’t feel good enough, and not in the way that I mentioned previously in this piece, but things like the database queries were slow and the Dictionary didn’t feel quite responsive enough, and it still doesn’t feel responsive enough for me. These queries are really hard to optimize and to get them where they are now probably took about a week or two. There’s still some bugs, and things feel fragile and I didn’t want to release things in a very fragile state, but I should probably just get it out there so some people can look at it

Two, the hosting is fragile and I don’t have a solid prod like developement environment yet.

Three, there was a library that I was using that was really not open source, the code was out on the web, but the license made it really hard to use. I had taken this library and made it a crucial library in the back end of this application. When I realized this, I decided that I need to completely remove this library before I could go completely public. This took over a month. It also involves rewriting a lot of things that I’d already wrote, which burned me out a little.

And the biggest of all, I don’t have a really good solution for what happens when stuff goes down and data can get lost. Proper data backup is not there and it should be. This last one is the one that made me think that I don’t have a good business plan or I don’t have a good plan in general for the future of Sakuryo and it’s users. Without this, it felt a little hopeless to release this application as the whole point of if Sakuryo is to have centralized data platform for learning Japanese. If Sakuryo’s data is gone, Sakuryo is gone.

For me, though, I still want this application and I’m willing to continue developing it at my own pace to get it to a point where I really look forward to using it every day. The state of the application is in right now is at a point where I feel like I at least want to use it to search up some words and to study them.

In the next week I will plan out my approach and priorities. And hopefully soon we will see Sakuryo start to incrementally get better feature by future.