WebDiary.io - an entry to Digital Ocean Hackathon

Roman Mikhailov - Dec 14 '20 - - Dev Community

For a while, I've been going over this idea in my head, wouldn't be nice to replace my paper notebooks with a digital solution? Of course, a notepad++, MS Word, Evernote, RocketBook already exist, but they don't do what I need -- a continuous timeline of day to day activities that I can order by project, client, activity type, and any other categories that will come up. I'd like to able generate reports for my daily stand ups, or just get an idea how the time was spent.

A recently announced Digital Ocean + Dev.to Hackathon is a kick in the butt that I'd needed to start working on this project. At the same time, I can shoot a few proverbial birds too. I want to learn Next.js, improve ReactJs skills, checkout the new Digital Ocean services and try out MongoDb Atlas.

https://webdiary.io was born. First, I followed the get started tutorial from Nextjs.org. Then, created an App on Digital Ocean and connected it to my code on https://github.com/webdiary-io/web. I registered a domain name with https://www.namecheap.com. It doesn't get easier than a search/pay/done. Finally, wrote a blog post so that the site does not look too "Hello World". It got Auto deployed on push. Easy!

Next, the plan of attack will be as simple as possible. After all, I only have 4 weeks in this hackathon.

  1. Add authentication & authorization - I think I'll go with Auth0,
  2. Create a form to add notes and timestamp them and #tag them,
  3. Add ability to search notes by keyword and tags
  4. Add ability to generate a report that will be useful for stand-ups (Yesterday, I did...)
  5. Add a pie-chart that shows how much time is spent per tag.

This looks like a decent MVP, and I'll be able to accomplish all the items on my wish list.

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