The project I’ll be writing about today is (tentatively) called Contactly, and it began because of my desire to not let so much time pass without reaching out to friends and family members. After realising that while similar software existed in the enterprise space for keeping track of clients, nothing existed that was designed specifically for personal use, so I decided to solve the problem myself and make my own.
As such, I began on my journey of creation. First, I spent some time simply brainstorming what features I would need, and then I spent some time drawing wireframes on paper and then mocking them up in Figma. After that, I decided on the tech stack that I was going to use to build my project, and started writing code.
Since then, it’s been an ongoing project, with the amount of code that I’m writing often being the inverse of how challenging school is at the time. This has meant that I have occasionally come back to the project after a few months of not looking at it with more knowledge in my tool belt (gained either through other internship experience or simply watching development related videos), and realise that a decision that I made was perhaps not the best one, and have reworked the code, and then continued to add features.
Although the main concept of the project is fundamentally pretty simple, this project has also allowed me to gain an appreciation for the features that take a project from proof-of-concept to useable day-to-day. Whether this has been working on adding reminder emails using Twilio Sendgrid after realising that users wouldn’t be wanting to continuously log in to see who they had to reach out to, or adding the option to import your existing contacts from external contact providers. (The ability to ‘link’ contacts instead of outright importing them is something I plan on adding soon.)
Altogether, Contactly has been an ongoing passion project for me, born out of a desire to stay connected with loved ones and friends. Through brainstorming, wireframing, and coding, I have developed a deeper understanding of the process of taking a proof-of-concept to a fully functional and usable application, and I am excited to continue working my project in the future.