Making a Social Networking App, Part 4 - Two steps back, one step forward

There is a moment in every software project when you see the light at the end of the tunnel. Something works that didn't before, and you feel like you've passed a milestone of sorts. Or maybe a millstone, depending on the task.

In my farmer's market application, one can now create markets, join them, and remove oneself from them. One can not drill down into them, arrange meetups, or do any of the other things one might like to do. One can not attach images or set start and stop dates or any of that.

But it's a start.

So now some time to step back and undo all my work. Well, not really. The code has grown organically, and now I need to be serious about it. The app needs a usable interface. It needs error-checking. It needs security. It needs some refactoring, where I smush all the code around and consolidate common functionality so that I have something a little less haphazard. I'll probably start a blog on it so that users can keep track of what's going on. So keep an eye on it, though be warned that I'll probably wipe out the database from time to time. Hopefully it will start looking like a real application soon.