[Journey] Follow Me As I Build A Professional Software From Scratch (Choose Your Own Adventure Style)

[HelloInsomnia 1103]

Hey Everyone,

 

This thread will document a journey I will be starting today and hope you all join me. This journey is going to be a series of videos where I create a program from scratch. People following the journey will be able to make decisions on what the program will be and I'll take that advice along with my own experience to craft the program to be the best that it can be.

 

Hopefully this will be a great learning tool as well as just something fun and a little bit different.

 

A few side notes:

 

Videos will be shot and posted. These will be pretty raw and so the quality - especially audio won't be perfect. I just won't be able to edit them due to the amount of content I expect there to be.

 

The choosing part will be done via polls in Get Response. You can fill in the options without subscribing but if you choose to subscribe at the end of the journey all my subs will receive the source code.

 

So with that out of the way let's jump straight into the fun part: what kind of program are we going to be making? I am going to just throw up a form to fill out and take some responses so that we can vote on them and go from there!

 

For this one please don't be too specific, say something like "SEO" or "Scraper" or "Social" and so on... and not "backlink creator for web 2.0" or "instagram account creator" - as we will narrow down the specifics after we choose a category!

 

Click here to choose a type of program to create!

 

I have taken all of the responses and divided them up into 5 categories. Here are the categories explained:

 

• SEO: Anything to help with SEO efforts such as research, backlinking and so on.
• System Utility: A program that typically doesn't work with websites. Something like a password keeper or file renamer.
• Tracker: Typically will use a database (so would require a plugin) - can track nearly anything you can think of over time
• Scraper: Self explanatory, will scrape useful info
• Social: Something with social media. I really would rather not do this if possible due to the constant updates it may not be useful so this category may be nixed.

 

Click Here to choose a category
 

The category that won was SEO which had 40% of the votes.Social, tracker and system utility each had 20% and surprisingly scraper had 0%.

 

For the last poll you can describe an SEO bot and I'll pick one or maybe have a vote. I kind of want to get things rolling though so I may just pick the one I think would be best for this project.

 

You can submit the ideas here

 

[HelloInsomnia 1103]

Link fixed!

 

Also, please make sure to follow the thread for updates

[BoosterBots 23]

Sent in my suggestion! Great job on doing this Nick. I am sure it will help a lot of people.

[Code Docta (Nick C.) 638]

excellent idea

[a2mateit 395]

I'll be following along for sure.

 

Always love seeing how other people do stuff.

[Aj. 2]

Thanks Nick,

 

This is a great idea for sure...

I'll be following along and I'm sure learning some great stuff along the way.

 

Edit...

Changed my mind, after seeing the options I’m in for the tracker, could be very handy and we would learn a little about databases etc.

Hope you don’t mind Nick

[HelloInsomnia 1103]

I'm going to let the first poll go for another day and then we can start voting on the category so far we have a few but I'd like to see a few more if possible!

 

Keep in mind this is supposed to be a resource and act as a guide to help people. So while I seem to be getting suggestions for things involving account creation and such I think those will not be a good idea. I may not actually include social for this reason. The main reason being: I don't want to build something and then have it break a week later. If it requires a lot of updating it could be counter productive. The goal is to build something that people can follow along to and the only way that can work is if it still works for people down the road. This may be tough to do so there will have to be some compromising but overall I'm going to try and steer clear of anything that I think will break in a short period of time.

[Edward_2 85]

I'm going to let the first poll go for another day and then we can start voting on the category so far we have a few but I'd like to see a few more if possible!

 

Keep in mind this is supposed to be a resource and act as a guide to help people. So while I seem to be getting suggestions for things involving account creation and such I think those will not be a good idea. I may not actually include social for this reason. The main reason being: I don't want to build something and then have it break a week later. If it requires a lot of updating it could be counter productive. The goal is to build something that people can follow along to and the only way that can work is if it still works for people down the road. This may be tough to do so there will have to be some compromising but overall I'm going to try and steer clear of anything that I think will break in a short period of time.

Ya the most important part is the Idea. It would be nice if it can be something completely different. Another thought would be to compile it and have the community here sell it, the $$ going into paying a developer to make a free community plugin or something like that. Just a thought.

 

How about build a bot to search for alien life. 

 

http://www.planethunters.org/#/classify

 

 

Build one that scrapes the light graphs and make it search for anomalies 

[HelloInsomnia 1103]

I have taken all of the responses and divided them up into 5 categories. Here are the categories explained:

 

• SEO: Anything to help with SEO efforts such as research, backlinking and so on.
• System Utility: A program that typically doesn't work with websites. Something like a password keeper or file renamer.
• Tracker: Typically will use a database (so would require a plugin) - can track nearly anything you can think of over time
• Scraper: Self explanatory, will scrape useful info
• Social: Something with social media. I really would rather not do this if possible due to the constant updates it may not be useful so this category may be nixed.

 

Click Here to choose a category

[Edward_2 85]

Which category would alien life be under? lol... so no to the search for alien life

[HelloInsomnia 1103]

Which category would alien life be under? lol... so no to the search for alien life

 

Tracker?

[HelloInsomnia 1103]

So far SEO is in the lead by a landslide, I'll give this another day or two for people to get their votes in.

[tnhomestead 16]

There is no alien life -- they all moved to Washington DC and became politicians!

 

On a serious note, sounds like a interesting journey -- hope I learn from it! Thanks for giving back to the community.

[Bot-Factory 602]

What about a Website / WebService management Tools?
Cpanel for example is widely used. Or wordpress for example. 

Wordpress updater via API.

Cpanel add database.

 

Stuff like that.

Cheers

Dan

[HelloInsomnia 1103]

What about a Website / WebService management Tools?

Cpanel for example is widely used. Or wordpress for example. 

 

Wordpress updater via API.

Cpanel add database.

 

Stuff like that.

 

Cheers

Dan

 

Hi Dan, thanks for the suggestions but the vote went through and we are going to be doing an SEO related bot. I'll make one more poll to see what it will be so we can get started.

[HelloInsomnia 1103]

The category that won was SEO which had 40% of the votes.Social, tracker and system utility each had 20% and surprisingly scraper had 0%.

 

For the last poll you can describe an SEO bot and I'll pick one or maybe have a vote. I kind of want to get things rolling though so I may just pick the one I think would be best for this project.

 

You can submit the ideas here

[HelloInsomnia 1103]

Going to leave the ideas poll up for another day or two and hopefully not three it really depends on submissions as the first two polls has many but this one only has 2 so far!

[HelloInsomnia 1103]

Still pretty low on responses so I'll leave it up for another day and then either pick the best one or come up with one myself.

[HelloInsomnia 1103]

First video will come out in another day or two, the responses were good but I need to find the balance between something that will take less than 20 hours to make (as it will all be filmed it can't be a 100 hour project). Something that most can follow along to (no plugins or maybe one plugin). Something that doesn't have to be updated very often so that it's still relevant in the coming months/years.

This is proving to be kind of hard to do so once I get the idea down everything else is ready to go and videos will start flowing

 

I'll create a section on my site for it and a Youtube playlist and update this post so that it's easy for everyone to follow along!

[a2mateit 395]

Hi Nick,

 

Glad to see there were enough responses to warrant you following up on this thread.

 

I for one am looking forward to see what you come up with

 

Cheers,

Justin

[kev123 132]

surprised no vote for scraper its one of the most profitable type of bot you can make. Sure if your scraping FB user id its not big money but build a scraper that gets data people want who actually run a business and its good money. You even have the possibility of running it as a service by populating a DB on the backend for a website.

 

kev123

[Marton 48]

surprised no vote for scraper its one of the most profitable type of bot you can make. Sure if your scraping FB user id its not big money but build a scraper that gets data people want who actually run a business and its good money. You even have the possibility of running it as a service by populating a DB on the backend for a website.

 

kev123

 

There might have been an anomaly in the data submission process there, I for one voted for Scraper myself

 

Cool journey though, I'll be following for sure, good luck with it!

 

Marton

[HelloInsomnia 1103]

There might have been an anomaly in the data submission process there, I for one voted for Scraper myself

 

Cool journey though, I'll be following for sure, good luck with it!

 

Marton

 

Now there is a vote for scraper but SEO still won out even now with the majority of the votes.

[a2mateit 395]

Scrapers for the most part are the easiest type of thing to create once you learn regex.

 

Probably why SEO won out, alot of people are confused about how to do SEO properly...

[HelloInsomnia 1103]

Update:

 

After a lot of deliberation I've decided to take a lot of your ideas and put them together into something that I think will be the most helpful despite it going against some of the things I wanted to avoid. It's too hard to come up with a quality idea that will be suited for this journey and won't require much maintenance and also its about the journey so while things may change on the sites we work with if people follow along in the future they will be able to see what has been changed and where and if they are coding along to the videos they will clearly see what's different and hopefully will learn from the other videos how to make it work at that time for them.

 

So we will be making a Web 2.0 Account Creator - I have no idea on the sites yet, I'll likely film that whole process too in finding them as that's the whole point of this - to show you everything. I originally wanted to make something that would take less time but this will be more useful I think in the end and that is what really matters. Also, it will be a great starting point for people who want to take it and expand on the idea and add sites of their own or even make a poster for the sites to go along with it. 

 

I know this has gotten off to a bit of a slow start but I have been working on the ideas part of it and testing things and every idea either got shot down or it wasn't very exciting and if it's not exciting then people won't use it. There is a lot of unknown for me in doing this, I'm sort of just saying let's do it without as much research into this topic as I'd like because I don't want to shoot down this ideas as well it's pretty exciting and I think people will like it so I'm just going to pull the trigger on it.