What we're gonna build

Adam Wathan and Jeffrey Way inspired me to build a new product. I'm totally excited about their ability to teach other developers. I consume a lot of knowledge on the Internet. But now I decided to give something back to the community. That's why I started looking for a product. A product that makes fun to build and at the same time useful.

Do you know what the best part is? You and I will build this product together. Step by step. You're gonna keep looking over my shoulders.

Brainstorming

I've been thinking long and hard. I've already built a lot of websites. Many independent products for intranets. I have also been building SaaS accounting software for over 3 years. So I need something new. But what?

In fact, I've been considering building a billing software with you again. From my many years of experience, however, I can say that this product is a "bottomless barrel". At least if you develop it in the depths what I did. Orders, letters, invoices, stock management, dunning, shop connection, and much more. After that, I was busy for quite a long time with the idea to develop a small helpdesk system. I even already had a domain for it. tinydesk.co. I love this domain. Maybe we'll do it another time. Why don't we start this project? Well. I already built a SaaS helpdesk variant more than 10 years ago. Probably one of the first on the market. Same here, the complexity should not be underestimated.

It is important to me that we find a product together with which you feel comfortable. That you can identify with. It is important that you understand the domain of this product. Only then can you constantly follow me and understand why we do things the way we do them.

Then one night, I had the idea. Often it annoys me that I don't notice, or only too late, that one of my websites is offline. Of course, there are already some products on the market. Pingdom, UpDown, UptimeMonitor, and many more. But everyone has a disadvantage. They are expensive and have more features than I actually need. And so the idea was born. A product that allows me to "ping" any number of websites. I get a notification as soon as a page is offline. No more, no less. And all that with a beautiful designed UI.

The product

So we build a product that is able to "ping" our websites. A product that informs us when our pages are offline. Pretty cool. We want to make it as simple as possible. We just want to restrict it to the essential features. Don't build features that nobody needs. There must be a name. A name, that is easy to remember. And after we "ping" websites, I decided to call it simple PingPing. I like it!

The Logo

I already built a logo. It combines the letter "P" of PingPing with the idea of a chart. Like an up and down chart. I hope you like it! Let me know, what you think.

The very first features

In order to stay focused, I've already written some points together, which in any case have to be put into our first version, so that PingPing deserves its name:

• Login
• Create/edit/delete web pages
• Determination of ping criteria
  • Frequency
  • Pausing
• Ping web pages
  • Online/offline status
  • Response times
• Notifications via e-mail in case of status change

What else do we need

Since I'm not sure yet if I want to distribute the product commercially, we'll probably also build the marketing page together. The first landing page to get some email addresses. And then the finished page with all relevant information.

The technology

Now the most exciting information for all of you. Which technologies will we work with? I don't need to write it any more complicated than it is. We rely on the Laravel framework. At the frontend, we will use VueJS and TailwindCSS. I can promise you one thing right now. It's gonna be really cool. I've been working a little bit ahead of you:)

By the way: I will try to build up the whole product with you "Test-Driven". From A-Z. From front to back.

And otherwise?

Actually, that's it! The only thing I have to say is this:

If you would like to join me, sign up now, follow me and @pingpingapp on Twitter and be excited about the first post, when it says "Let's get the ball rolling".