On September 21st 2016, 3:30PM (🇮🇳 *Indian *Standard Time), we decided to do something different. We wanted to challenge ourselves to create something unique and different in less than 24 hours (With necessary sleep, rest and family time for humans).
21st September 2016
5:00 pm — 6:30 pm: Name Choosing, Domain booking, Git inits, Architecture and Workflow Drawings and planning + fun.
6:30 pm — 7:00 pm: Skcript’s mandatory mid-week snack time.
7:00 pm — 9:00 pm: Family, running and exercise time.
9:00 pm — 12:30 am (22nd Sep.): Barebones version if Pollfury is now ready.
22nd September 2016
9:30 am — 2:00 pm: User Interface, User Interaction, Branding and launch blogpost gets ready.
2:00 pm — 5:00 pm: Launch checks, bug fixes, performance improvements and lots of such calm work.
5:00 pm — 6:00 pm: Scheduling everything for launch. And having some office-made popcorn.
Now, let’s get to the other details.
#1: Arriving at the name
We love Nick Fury. The character who is literally the backbone of the Avengers. This is kind of a tribute for that character.
#2: The Goal
Here are the goals we worked towards:
- The platform has to be super simple
- It should be available in a very intuitive way on the web
- A person should be able to create a poll in less than 10 seconds
- Any viewing action should not take more than 3seconds (To render or to make some sense out of it)
- The entire platform should be responsive
- Learn something new in DevOps (We learnt how to setup a distributed server)
- Reach ⚡️Flash Speed in both development and DevOps. (We were able to deploy the server architecture in less than 30 minutes)
#3: The Features
- Ability to create Polls with just four options
- Set desired colors for Polls
- Basic Analytics
- Responsive and is accessible from all the phones, tablets, phablets and TVs
- Auto-generate OG images using Imagemagick w/colors
#4: But wait, Surveymonkey, Twitter, Facebook Polls? Why can’t I just use them?
Please do if that works best for you. We created Pollfury to push ourselves to the limit and create a platform from our learning in the past. And we have achieved it so far. We were not able to see a platform which allowed us to go from thinking of a poll to sharing a poll in less than 10 seconds. We wanted such a platform, and we created it.
#5: We wanted to have fun. Pure fun.
Above everything else, we wanted to have a lot of fun working on such small projects. Pollfury taught us a lot and got the team closer together. While this is for today, tomorrow, there’s a new platform coming in for you.