Meetlog: a lot has changed
I have started from scratch.
I've been intentionally refraining from writing an update for https://meetlog.io for several reasons.
First, I've started from scratch. Yes, I know, not the best decision for a product that's not validated yet. But still, you don't validate an idea, that's broken at its core.
Second, I had made some wrong decisions purely from a technical perspective. One such decision was the choice to use SCSS. As the implementation was still in its earliest stages, I had decided that it will be much easier to just start from scratch and call it a day.
And that's exactly what I did.
The "redesigned" idea
As I said, my idea was broken.
The broken aspect of it was the approach to a meeting I was proposing to the user. It was merely dull. Each meeting had several sections, where a user could enter information - like Notes section, Next steps, agenda, etc. Nothing that you couldn't do in a simple spreadsheet/doc/txt file.
The approach has bothered me right from the beginning of the development of the product. I knew there was something wrong. But I kept working on it.
Couple of days ago I had the "click".
Each meeting is basically a set of "inputs" from the attendees. As a result of the meeting, there's the meeting's "output". That was it. This simple analogy from programming brought me to the following idea:
As you can see from the screen above, the meeting now consists of an input section and an output section. The UI resembles a chat screen, but with a twist. The left side (the meeting input) is indeed a chat section, where every one of the attendees can quickly jot down an idea, thought or drop a file.
Then the twist.
Each one of the input entities can be converted to an output.
The CSS
The SCSS approach to the UI of the old implementation was a mistake.
Don't get me wrong. CSS/SCSS is awesome, I love writing it and I love experimenting with it. But compared to the tailwind way of doing UI, it's a joke.
I mean the amount of time I spend implementing a UI component is hilarious now. And making changes is a breeze.
Overall, the productivity boost of using a utility-first css framework is huge.
This allows me to move faster and experiment more aggressively.
And last, but not least, implementing dark mode is a piece of cake with tailwind. It basically costs me 1 min. more for each component to support dark mode, which is negligible, compared to the efforts I had to make to do the same thing with SCSS.
The progress
I'm happy with the progress now. It's a bit slower than I'd like it to be, but still, I've decided to play the long game here. I'm investing a bit more upfront and bet that I'll get much more ROI in the future. It's not the leanest approach, but that's how I roll with meetlog.
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