Thirsty Library Follow-Up: First Steps

"Decide whether to focus on web application or mobile app"

Following up on my personal project, I've been considering the above question, and to avoid decision paralysis, made the executive decision to build the project as a web application in next.js to begin with. My reasoning comes down to the following points:

1. My knowledge of React will carry over to a web application/next.js better than it will to mobile development (onboarding will hopefully be smoother)
2. It will be easier to program and support different platforms
3. It will hopefully be easier to rebuild the project as a mobile app once I have fresh experience working with next.js
4. I suspect it will be easier to demo and show off when it can be accessed from more platforms (including a web browser)
5. It puts an end to decision paralysis

Frankly it was a decision I didn't want to put off making anymore. Decision paralysis has killed off more than one previous passion projects of mine in the past.

Next Steps

The next major hurdle is going to be that of education. I know plenty of React, but that knowledge hasn't been put to use in years, and I can't say just yet how well that information has been retained or will transfer to learning next.js. With that in mind, I've done some research into learning resources:

• To start, there's the official next.js documentation. It seems like this may have a reputation of being pretty well maintained and user-friendly
• Besides the official next.js docs, they also have full free courses designed to teach next.js and the development of web apps to people just like me! There are 4 courses offered, and I'll be starting with the App Router course that will have me building a financial dashboard application from scratch
• But also among those 4 courses is a React Foundations course, and to be honest, a refresher wouldn't hurt, so I intend to be reviewing that all the while I'm learning

One of the courses is also wholy devoted to SEO (Search Engine Optimization). To be honest, that's something I have mixed feelings about. As I understand it, SEO is the reason every recipe online has to have a long preamble before you get to the recipe. But if this project turns out to be successful and manages to keep my passion, then I suppose I will want to make sure people are able to find it when it's done...

One Last thing

I was doing some research on the topic of Summer Reading Programs and their history, and I found this neat article:

A Brief History of Summer Reading Programs

It comes from someone else's project where users can log their reading minutes and track their reading habits. It seems to be designed more for educators. There doesn't seem to be much overlap with Thirsty Libraries (I should probably think of a better name, huh?)