MakeYourApp.today
Intro
This book teaches you how to build any application you want on your own!
Nowadays, with the help of efficient development toolkit, open-source frameworks, and AI assisted programming, everyone can make an app with much less effort in a very short time. Recent rise of ChatGPT and copilot also showed us huge improvement in productivity brought by human-AI collaboration.
In the near future, 1 human being + 1 set of productive toolchains + 100 AI models = create anything you want.
This eBook is answering the question of how to choose development toolchains, open-source frameworks, and AI tools that are off-the-shelf to rapidly develop “small but beautiful” applications independently.
Over the past three years, I have developed five web applications around the Gallinula platform:
📌 forum: Now accumulated more than 700 users at Duke Kunshan University.
📌 thewall: An anonymous message board. There are already 13,200+ messages, with an average daily PV of around 600, and can reach 2600+ daily visits at peak time.
📌 2021/2022flag: A webpage to make your New Year’s ambitions, customized with DKU features. It received over 200+ user retweets during New Year's Day 2022.
📌 NextShuttle: A webpage that displays a countdown of the shuttle bus schedule.
📌 Gallinula Course: A platform to rate the curriculums and professors. Still under development, but has 60+ users pre-registered and received 200+ data records.
Creating these apps isn’t that complicated as most people think. The first version of thewall took only 9 days from idea to launch. Gallinula Course took me 4 days. And NextShuttle is a much simpler single page application, which only takes 7 hours in total. I feel that I have gradually found a shortcut to develop applications in this process. With efficient development tools, existing development frameworks, and some AI model assistance, it is not difficult to build a product that can be put into use within a week.
So this eBook MakeYourApp.today is telling you how to choose better toolchains that are off-the-shelf to rapidly develop “small but beautiful” applications. It covers both technical details and product thinkings that teaches how to not only "make your app" but also "make your app better".
In order to keep the book up-to-date, I decided to update it once a year to address the rapid changing toolchains. I hope it will provide readers with the most up-to-date and practical guide to independent development, so that they can keep improving their skills and realize their any ideas!
Section A: Make Your App
Section B: Make Your App Better
Published: 2023-02-15