An application in fifteen minutes
A two-day sprint: the bot turned into a standalone web app with a demo mode — while submitting the accelerator application itself took fifteen minutes and ended with a beer.
By Georg Malahov
The accelerator application is in. The submission itself took about fifteen minutes: my friend and I copied in the texts he had prepared in advance, and in the last field we wrote that this is a hobby project alongside a day job and that it has already received several positive reviews from people. Sent it off — and sat down with a beer to celebrate. By eleven in the evening I was completely wiped out, but on the way home I still dictated this note into the journal.
Fifteen minutes is just the tip. Underneath it sits a two-day sprint. On Thursday, February 27, we had a forty-nine-minute call and decided: enough discussing, tomorrow we meet and submit. On Friday I got up early and did the main thing: the bot stopped being a Telegram-only bot. I added a web client — notes, including audio and geolocation, now upload straight from the browser — and built a React component for voice recording. Everything on one page: date picker, chat, search, file uploads. In the afternoon we camped out in the coworking space, and my friend took on the content for the demo.
The demo is a separate invention I'm pleased with. A person reading the application won't install anything or register, so we made a demo user: one click — and you're inside the working app, where a real day from my friend's mountain trip last summer is already loaded. Voice messages, photos, a map. Open the chat — it shows the day's messages, you can search, you can ask questions. Not screenshots — a live product.
That mountain demo day — voice notes, photos, a map; the demo still lives in the app
Open the chat and ask about the day in your own words — it answers from the notes
Today I sat up until six in the morning, then another four and a half hours in the afternoon. Lots of small things got done: a home-screen icon from Safari, signing out the regular user when entering the demo so nobody accidentally writes notes into the public account. The one thing that still annoys me — images rotate sideways on upload: locally everything works, from the Docker container it doesn't, and I haven't figured out why yet.
In the evening, while polishing the demo day, things surfaced that you only see from the outside. You scroll the timeline — a pile of identical-looking audio messages up top, and only then the maps and photos; the notes all look the same, and without a short summary inside each one it's impossible to find your way around. And when we asked the chat what the hotel from the trip was called, it turned out there's no address anywhere — only a coordinate. A person expects an address, not a latitude and longitude; geocoding needs to be bolted on. The to-do list also picked up small items: a logo, a favicon, analytics. My friend's son promised to make a demo video.
The application is out; from here on, little depends on us. But for the first time I have a version of the journal you can let a total stranger into with a single link.