On weekend web apps

Andre Torrez offers some advice for those who think that they can clone a popular web app over the weekend. The best part — or the worst, if you’re the aspiring weekend programmer — is that each item on the list is a little Pandora’s box of Alice’s rabbit holes. Like this:

Lost password flow. You’ll want to generate a key and store it someplace for when someone requests to reset their password. So that’s another email that has to go out.

If you actually want your email to arrive at its destination, you’re gonna have to worry about all this. Or go through a third-party service, which is another interface (and bill (and moving part)) that you need to worry about. You get the point…making a web app work for more than just one person is hard, way harder than it looks unless you’ve done it.

• Andre Torrez
• programming