Pivoting on my Final Project
I decided to table GivingSmart. After about a week of trudging through Catarseâs massive, sprawling codebase and its 100+ libraries, I decided that I just wasnât getting enough done quick enough. Catarse is a production app that was developed by a team of 7+ developers. Itâs the kind of thing that Iâd be working on if I actually joined a company and had to be inculcated into a novel codebase.
Integrating whole new dimensions of presentation and functionality with Catarseâs massive back-end would be so onerous that this project would not take not weeks, but months to complete. Over the week, this slowly dawned on me. It was Saturday when I finally made the call and got in touch with the guys who asked me to do this.
It was tough, but they agreed with my evaluation. I decided it was time to pivot. I put GivingSmart on the shelf and set to attacking another project that I thought would be more tenable in the time I had left: making an EA charity gift cards app. The app is going to be tentatively be called âA Better Present.â
A Better Present
Itâs going to be a couple of orders of magnitude simpler than GivingSmart, but thatâs good. It allows me to really polish what I have and build on what I know. Catarse was an overwhelmingly involved codebase. Studying it taught me about a lot of libraries and ways to structure an app. I want to put some of that into practice with A Better Present.
The flow of the app will basically work like this:
You decide you want to purchase a charity gift card
You select a design, who youâre sending it to, and how much the card will be worth. You also choose 3 (among a list of 10-15) high-impact charities you want your recipient to select from.
You write them a message. Then you pay for the card.
You can decide whether to send them an automated e-mail at a certain time, or send/tell them the link yourself.
The link thatâs generated for them will be three random normal English words (much like what http://what3words.com or http://gfycat.com do). With a 2000 word dictionary, that amounts to 8 billion unique slugs. Theyâll have to enter in the first name of the sender as an extra layer of security.
The recipient then gets to play a giving game. Basically, they read about each of the charities, see pictures and stuff, and then decide how much of the money theyâll allot to each charity.
And thatâs basically it! Itâs essentially a giving game wrapped in a gift card. Giving games are known to be one of the most effective ways to get people to thinking deeply about the relative tradeoffs of charities, so I think itâs a really awesome way to both do some good, and be engaging tothe recipient.
I think if this thing gets some traction, it could be a very effective twist on traditional gift-giving. Getting someone a charity gift card for their birthday and letting them pick where the money goes would be, in my opinion, an awesome and unique present. Itâs a beautiful gesture of affection, and at the same time it demonstrates the ideas behind effective giving.
This might be a smaller scale project than GivingSmart, but the possibility for behavioral change could be bigger if we can convince effective altruists to start doing this as a baseline behavior in their lives instead of default gift-giving. I donât know, maybe I should be more skeptical. But Iâm excited at the possibilities.
Anyway, Iâm something like halfway done now, I think. Tomorrow is technically my last day at App Academy before I start teaching for the upcoming cohort. So Iâll likely continue working on this on my own for a while. But Iâm okay with that. Iâll also start talking to some potential users over the next week or two and see what changes this thing might warrant. Itâs exciting!
And it feels good to actually get some traction in terms of developing. Actually building something is a really satisfying feeling!
















