Where is the value in your application?

Yesterday, I was in Birmingham for a hackathon event organised by the School of Code, who I've been a Bootcamp mentor for for the last few cohorts.

At the event, I was mentoring a team of three Bootcamp graduates to plan and build a Christmas-themed application.

We decided on a Christmas walking application where people can view upcoming walks, log in and book a place.

After designing some initial pages, such as the Home page with a login form, a registration form, a list of walks and a walk detail page, we started to code them.

Naturally, we started with the Home page, the login form and the login functionality.

But, is that the most valuable part of the application?

What differentiates it from other applications, such as the ones being built by other squads at the event?

In this case, it's the page showing the list of walks and, if you click one, the details about that walk.

The squad needed to give a presentation and demo of the application by the end of the day, so we needed to prioritise.

We refocused on the walk pages and built them before moving back to the other pages to complete the user journey so it could be shown.

Similarly, we didn't need a fully functional user login and registration system for the demo. We just needed to show the forms we'd built, demo the user journey and show how someone would find and register for an event.

When I'm building an application, I identify the most valuable part and focus on it rather than other unrelated functionality that could likely be done manually or another way until that functionality is available.

The beginning of the user journey isn't always the best first thing to start developing.

It was a great day, our squad won the prize for the event, and I look forward to attending more events and continuing to work with the School of Code.