How I launched "The Famous Poet" in #ChallengedBySquirrel MVP Sprint(1st Iteration).

The #ChallengedBySquirrel MVP sprint is a 30 days challenge, for remote developers to think up an idea, create prototypes, and finally deploy their projects. I accepted this challenge and braced myself for an exciting and challenging adventure. So, I came up with an idea I titled "The Famous Poet".

This is a naive pitch of my idea:

"As we grow and give birth to children in this jet age, some traditional cultures become obsolete. We often forget old poems, proverbs and songs that our parents and ancestors used to know.
The Famous Poet is an ancient poet who was with our forefathers in their time. It understood their languages and remembers all the poems they recited as they grew up.

The Famous Poet also lives with us in this present age and will be with our children in years to come.

The Famous Poet speaks many languages.

Visit the Famous Poet home and listen as it recites poems you will love. If you like the Famous Poet, then teach it your language".

My Objective: Build a crowdsourcing app that will help us transfer down tradition through poems and songs. The app will store collections of history poems, songs across several languages. Because the WWW never really dies, the next generation will also find this app useful as it could serve as a base for future development or innovation.

In the next few sections, I will summarize:

1. How I completed the 1st iteration in 30 days- my goals, challenges, lessons learnt, results and failures.

2. Roadmap for the 2nd iteration in 30 days - what I intend to build, additional features, milestones and expected deliverables.

1st Iteration Completed

Early in this phase, I set out with so much enthusiasm and fuel.

I divided the 4 weeks into four major milstones milestones containing smaller specific tasks and duration. This approach helped me to focus on making smaller steps each week, that brought me closer to my goal.

Although my original intention was to launch the desktop and mobile version of the app within this iteration, I suffered a major setback and lost 1 week and 3 days to my dad's health challenge. Thereafter, I figured, I just needed to focus on completing the desktop version which was already 60% ready by that same third week. Being able to recover from this temporary setback and redirect my focus to the task at hand, taught me determination, discipline and patience.

Luckily for me, the first two milestones (weeks) where smoothly completed with the expected deliverable. This made it easy for me to transition to working extra hours to make up for the lost time.

To keep this post short, I will in another update itemize how I spent each week, each day for the past 30 days.

Roadmap for 2nd Iteration

In the 1st iteration, I mastered how to integrate firebase as a back-end for a react app. One remarkable advantage was, the ability to quickly prototype with less worry about a custom backend while enjoying full capabilities of a regular backend.

In the next iteration, which I intend to commence after a 1-week break, here are my goals:

1. Collect and analyse feedback on how to improve the app
2. Collect and update my poem database with up to 50 additional local poems with translation and audio voice-overs.
3. Complete the mobile version of the app which is about 40% ready at the time of this post, and sync to firebase.
4. Prototype an API-based custom back-end as preparation for building additional features.

Although the MVP sprint #ChallengedBySquirrel was only for #30 days, I have decided to challenge myself, and push forward with next iteration.

Finally, I wish to give credits to:

Aphinya Dechalert who inspired me with this challenge, and very helpful resources at DottedSquirrel and Medium.

Also Poetry Foundation for their rich collection of poetry, Badilish Poetry X-change for providing some information about African poets, and One for featuring some of the poets I used as a base for this project. Thanks to Emmanuel Acheampong for his helpful analysis of black poets.

Then to everyone who has motivated me to push on with this quest.

You can visit the famous poet with this link The Famous Poet

Kindly send in your feedback to any of my open channels. I will be very happy to hear them.

Email: [e-mail]
Twitter: DM @vokeugo
LinkedIn: DM Victor Okeugo
Whatsapp: [phone]

You can follow this project on:
Twitter: @vokeugo
LinkedIn: Victor Okeugo
Dev.To: #ChallengedBySquirrel Journey by Victor Okeugo
Gists: Famous Poet
Github: Famous Poet