Ryan Kulp – The 24 Hours MVP

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There are no “secrets to building quickly.” Here’s my exact process to building anything in a day:

Whenever I start a new project, this sequence ensures I waste as little time as possible on my hunt for The Truth. What’s “The Truth?” Finding out if people care about what you built, or not.

Powerpoint presentations and theoretical lectures are for losers. At Founder/Hacker we learn by doing.

In this course we’ll build three Rails apps with varying complexity. We’ll start with the simplest commands — running “rails new” — and by the end you’ll be installing gems, integrating APIs, deploying to your own dot-com domains with working Stripe subscription payments, and even building admin panel with user impersonation and fancy charts.

Each app will explore the core steps I described above (Wireframe, Data modeling, Frontend, Backend) with increasing level of detail. And by popular request, code will be available in “freeze time” at the end of every lecture, so you never miss a beat.

Prerequisites

This course will not teach you to code from scratch. To maximize value from 24 Hour MVP, first enroll in our Fundamentals course, which will take you 20-30 hours to complete and make you proficient in Ruby.

Curriculum:
Welcome

• What to expect

• Setting up your environment

• Confirming your environment works

Overview of a SaaS application

• SaaS Web Application Architecture

• My proven process to build quickly

• Terminology (CRUD, DRY, MVC, and many more)

App #1 – Anonymous Suggestion Box

Turn written feedback into anonymous, public Tweets for all to see.
• What we’re building
• Naming our app

• Creating a fresh Rails app

• Wireframe – Single Page CRUD App

• Data modeling – Creating a database

• [Bonus] Version control with Git

• Data modeling – Inserting database tables

• [Bonus] Connecting git with GitHub

• Frontend – Creating pages

• Frontend – Implementing UI with Tailwind

• Backend – Creating database records

• Backend – Creating a Twitter App

• Backend – Using the Twitter API

• Backend – Integrating Twitter in our application

• Backend – Connecting to the Frontend

• Backend – Improving our Twitter service

• [Bonus] Javascript listeners to improve UX

• Backend/Frontend – Validations to prevent bad data

• [Challenge] Saving and exposing Tweet URLs

• [Solution] Saving the Tweet ID and URL

• [Solution] Show Tweet URL on Home Page

• Expansion ideas (how to earn back your course tuition)

• Preparing to release our application

Deploying applications to a server

My simple process for turning source code into a production web app on a custom domain.
• Overview

• Domain setup and DNS

• Provisioning a server

• Deploying to a server

• Debugging our deployment

• Connecting our server to a domain

• [Bonus] Accessing the production database

App #2 – Stakeholder Update Network

Private platform where founders can share monthly updates with other founders.
• What we’re building
• Wireframe – Part 1

• Wireframe – Part 2

• Data modeling – Defining tables and attributes

• Creating a Rails app from a template

• Data modeling – Writing and running migrations

• Data modeling – Adding associations to Models

• Data modeling – Changing table names

• Frontend – Landing page and Tailwind config

• Frontend – Using partials and building an application form

• Frontend – Admin panel and namespaced routes

• Frontend – Dashboard and RESTful routing

• Frontend – Finishing touches

• Backend – Whitelisting form parameters

• Backend – Whitelisting form “radio” inputs

• Backend – Admin panel and private controller methods

• Backend – Building transactional mailers

• Backend – Creating user logins

• Backend – Magic login links

• Backend – Onboarding and forced user login

• Backend – Dashboard and database seeding

• Backend – Model scopes and subscriber form

• Backend – Handling rich text

• Backend – Update endpoint and DRY controllers

• Backend – Digest mailer and better seeds

• Backend – Viewing updates and DigestService batching

• Backend – Getting started with Stripe

• Backend – Implementing Stripe Checkout

• Backend – Final cleanup

• Backend – Enforcing free plan rules

• Backend – Production mailers

• Backend – Cron jobs and tasks

• Backend – Deploying to production

• Backend – Intro to delayed jobs

• Setting up cron jobs in production

App #3 – Embeddable JavaScript Widget

Single line of code, embeddable on any website, that lets website visitors send you text messages without exposing your phone number.
• What we’re building

• Wireframe – Interface + Widget UX

• Data modeling – Sketching table names and relationships

• Data modeling – Creating our app and generating migrations

• Frontend – Widget CRUD

• Frontend – Popup message form

• [Bonus] JavaScript 101

• [Bonus] JavaScript + DOM

• Frontend – Creating an embeddable JS snippet

• Frontend – Making our snippet embeddable on other websites

• Frontend – Sending form data with fetch

• Frontend – Widget UX improvements

• Frontend – Dynamic widget styling

• Frontend – Messages view

• Frontend – Landing page and live preview editor

• Frontend – More challenges and cleanup

• Backend – Widget avatar storage on AWS S3

• Backend – Message CSV export

• Backend – Async requests without JavaScript

• Backend – Text Message API

• Backend – User email notifications

• Backend – Final cleanup and billing strategies

• Backend – Predeploy challenges

• Backend – Deploying with the Heroku CLI

• [Bonus] Future lecture ideas