#albumium

Last week I completed the “Public Album” feature in Albumium. I had deployed the new changes while I was in San Francisco. While I was there, I also took a lot of pictures and those can now be found in the first Albumium Public Album -- http://bit.ly/1IPc4sv.

The Public Albums feature allows other people to share their photos by requesting to be invited into the album. For instance, other San Francisco tourists could post their photos into my San Francisco album.

Development for Albumium officially started on October 22, 2014. That’s when I created my project in Rally and planned out my sprints.

A couple of weeks before that I was thinking of projects to do to help me in learning the Ruby and AngularJS technology stack (I came from a .NET, Java, and Windows background).

I was in the middle of finishing a Java-based project, which, like Albumium, also interfaces with Google+ Photos, Flickr, and OneDrive.  I though that I could abandon that project, re-imagine it, and also re-write the re-useable portions of it in Ruby and AngularJS.

My plan involved 11 sprints which ends in the middle of March 2015. The goal is at the end of 11 sprints I will have all the core features of Albumium completed. Essentially my MVP.

I have to say, shipping the MVP was successful given that I had delivered what I had set out to do in time. I’m extremely proud of what I had accomplished since I’ve done a lot in a short amount of time. “Short” since I have to work on this only at nights and weekends. Plus, I have to work around my personal life and my full-time job.

In the end, I had not only delivered a fully working MVP, but I also came out a better Software Engineer. I’ve touched upon the entire stack of this product including the systems engineering aspects of it. I now know more than what I used to 5 or 6 months ago.

But of course, the MVP is not the end. I have User Stories left in the backlog and I’m working on them now. The list includes:

Integration with Twitter

Integration with Dropbox

Integration with OneDrive

Native apps for iOS and Android

Photo Annotations

Commenting

More Privacy and Permission Options (including enabling Public views)

Geotagging

etc.

These ones will be delivered as they are completed and you’ll see them come up as new features on the site. Unlike the MVP, which is the first initial push to get out a working product out the door, these next User Stores will be delivered more iteratively.

And yes, I’m still the only working on this.