Putting it together
The story: my wife owns a dance studio and all of the software that I've seen out there isn't great. It does what it needs to do (most of the time) but in a package that makes easy tasks tedious. The trick is, to make it easier on the end user often makes it harder in development. I've created Excel file after Excel file with SQL queries pulling from multiple places just to do relatively simple tasks that you would assume, hope, and think software meant for this kind of thing would be able to do. I'm writing software to do studio management the way I think my wife would want to be able to do it. Intelligent displays for relevant tasks for both directors and instructors, bulk editing of classes, batch enrolling of students based on whatever criteria you can think of, adding charges for costumes, recital fees, competitions, etc. There are a multitude of things that need to be done and a whole bunch of different ways to do them, so I hope to make Polyfive flexible enough to fulfill those needs.
What's the current status of Polyfive?
The product is multiple levels of customers: my customers are studio/academies/schools and their customers are families and students. My level of customer interaction is complete; a new user can create an account, a subscription, and create their business that allows them to access the admin and portal with their business name in the URL. They can also create a Stripe account to allow their own customers to pay via credit card.
Right now I'm working on my customer's level of interaction. I have a display of classes, families, and students and I'm currently working on bulk editing lessons.
So what is this then?
Staying motivated when working on a solo project is hard. I can easily get wrapped up in perfecting small parts of the application when time would be better spent on broader strokes. This is an attempt to put updates, statuses, and thoughts out there so that they don't clang around in my own brain.
Why "Polyfive"?
No great reason. Our family loves to visit Disney World. The Polynesian is our favorite resort. And there are five of us. Poly+five.
For the technical out there...
Polyfive is built on:
- TALL stack. Tailwind CSS, AlpineJS, Livewire, Laravel. Developers love acronyms. But Laravel/PHP/Livewire/Tailwind/etc. isn't enterprise-ready! Tools have different jobs. This tool fits this job.
- Laravel Vapor. tldr; It takes your Laravel code and makes AWS Lambda functions out of it. You pay per request and memory usage, but it makes Ops a negligible cost for a one-person team.
- Flowbite. Components built on top of Tailwind CSS. Flowbite is polarizing in the development world. But I like that I can make components work like you would expect them to without a lot of extra coding.
- A bunch of Composer packages.