What I learned building the app

Last Update: 31.05.2018. By Jens in Developers Life | Learning | Newsletter

  It started as a short tutorial app for you guys and moved on to become an own product. Let's see if that works. However, today I'll share with you what I learned this time.

The purpose was to learn a new thing, building something simple with a spreadsheet.

1. Stick to learn one thing at a time. I already told you that I did not adhere to my own sayings here and added two new things to the mix - Gradle and Kotlin. While this mix worked out fine in the end, it did create some problems at the beginning. Kotlin and Eclipse don’t work for me, strange problems, endless restarts of Spring Boot via maven or gradle. It works though with Intellij; yet hot reloading or disabling the Thymeleaf cache did not work.
2. Using the Google Sheets API was simple. The docs are fine and you can go with it. The only issues were about the ValueRange syntax and how to set the API key. It was not directly clear that the first part of the ValueRange is the name of the table aka sheet. And all examples I found use OAuth2 access.
3. You don’t need to publish the Google Sheet. Setting the rights to public and anyone who knows the url can read it, is enough. One step less.
4. If you start with Kotlin, add some more time to adjust then you think first.
5. Turn it into a product even you don’t want to. It will teach you business thinking and analyzing what is important and what not. Not only featurewise. Don’t shoot for perfection but rather for publishing a first version. The lessons you will learn will directly influence your day to day dev work and how you cooperate with business guys at work.
6. If you want to get better at #5, build stuff with tech you know in and out. You can focus on the new skills.

Did you code along? What did you learn?