Day 3 – Building Mkwanja 📱

It’s been a challenging 9 months of juggling full time employment and studying #softwaredevelopment at Moringa School and I am proud and relieved to finally reach the end of this journey. As the graduation day draws near, I can’t help but feel grateful for all the support from my family, my colleagues at Yakwetu Online Limited, as well as my Technical Mentors Rhonajoy Koome and Erick Mong’are. Indeed, by their support, God has seen me through.

Now, with the newly-found extra time, I’ve decided to work on a #sideproject that I have long awaited to start and launch. It’s name? Mkwanja – a web app to help Kenyan youth who struggle with budgeting to easily create a budget that works for them and help them stick to it. Mkwanja will differ slightly from other budgeting apps in that it will be integrated with Mpesa to make and restrict payments according to the set budget.

The intention of this side project is to continue my learning journey, by building the Mkwanja app to handle increased traffic efficiently and optimize the code, database queries, and infrastructure for improved performance.

As part of the plan, I shall be sharing my progress here at least twice a week. Today is Day 3 of the project and I’m currently at the #systemdesign step of my #developmentprocess (which is just my version of the established Software Development Life Cycle. Let me know what you think in the comments):

1. Problem Statement
2. Research & Bench-marking
3. Solution & List of Features
4. Technical Requirements
5. System Design
6. UI Design
7. Database Design
8. Break down project tasks
9. Development
10. Testing
11. Deployment
12. Iteration

To come up with the system design for Mkwanja, I’m currently taking a short course by freeCodeCamp (https://lnkd.in/dZRh-V8b). Should that not suffice, I’ll also utilize ByteByteGo‘s content on how to Design a Product: https://lnkd.in/dPm5eMd7. I believe this should be enough for me to produce a comprehensive system design which I will post here later this week. I would love to get your feedback on it once I do.

That’s it for now! I’m very excited about this new journey I’m undertaking and I already can’t wait to build the next thing. I think I’ll build a #javascript library next 😎 .

Feel free to accompany me on this journey, share your comments or contribute your insights wherever you can. Until next time, have a good one.

#buildinginpublic