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Moemin Mamdouh πŸ‘¨β€πŸ’»
Moemin Mamdouh πŸ‘¨β€πŸ’»

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Don't underestimate development time.

Hi there, dev.to! πŸ‘‹

I was supposed to launch my side project 20 days ago. I think you can see where i'm going with this, but long story short, i'm falling short of that promise.

A little background: I'm a designer who's working on a side project with a developer friend. We started around early February and estimated that we would be able to launch by the end of March.

Everything was going great, we wrapped up development and pushed to Netlify to test it out with a few users who have signed up to our waitlist. Except:

1- We use Github login, we completely forgot the permissions to be read-only. Lots of users pointed that out.

2- Edge cases for subscriptions were not handled properly.

3- Some edge cases for our downloadable templates required design modification, so back to the drawing board we went.

4- Some of the templates were missing files (woops).

5- Solutions/comments showed the wrong timestamps.

There's a ton of bugs that showed up during early user testing which if you think about it, isn't that bad. We avoided what could have been a disaster if we launched.

The point is, we thought if we wrap up development, that's the project. User testing was always going to be after we launch and receive feedback from actual users, thankfully we did not go that route and it ended up to our advantage, but it's back to development for us.

I'm building this project in public on Twitter if you'd like to follow me on the journey :)

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