#003 First App, Getting Artsy
With the foundations from Traefik + Authentik plus the blog ready to go, we embark on building our first project. Often, business produce a lot of data without checking its accuracy, and then make decisions on this data. There is a direct correlation between the quality of data and the quality of decision making. However, too many organizations rely on basic system checks or manual Excel-based workflows to “spot-check” data . With qcomb, I intend to build a platform that empowers customers to implement appropriate governance control. The motto is Trusted data , Trusted insights.
Why Am I Even Doing this?
In 2023, I launched an application at my company that was a moderate success (compared to resources invested). We scaled it up, over time, with minimal resources. We did not pitch to anybody, customers came to us… and it wasn’t even great. V1 was an MVP build in 2022, V2 is the internal application built in 2023/2024. This is a V3 of sorts. There are a few rounds of Lessons Learnt, which gives me hope to achieve Product-Market Fit. The goal is to make something useful that is not capital-intensive, and that we can turn into a business later.
A Scalable, Flexible and Frugal Architecture
I intend to pivot a bunch, so I am prioritizing flexibility and scalability. To achieve this, we will separate the application into 3 core elements and follow the standard pattern: Auth -> Backend -> Frontend.
- An Authentication and Authorization service that validates users are who they say they are, and enables fine-tuning of permissions and roles for business processes. The service will be Authentik, hosted behind Traefik and deployed via Docker.
- A Python Backend Service that will contain the logic to wrangle data to be vended downstream to the application’s front-end.
- A Frontend service that will serve the content to end-users. We will go with Tanstack Start + React as framework, with components using shadcn/ui and Tailwind CSS. We will host this using Bun on a server.
Everything will be under one "box" or server, with each component sitting in a container deployed via docker and networking between components managed by Traefik.
The Fun Stuff: Logo, Colors, and Fonts
To take a break from the CLI, I decided to spend a couple of hours on branding and design. I decided to re-use an old logo I made when I was younger, and far more creative. I added some color, re-kerred the letters, and played around with the white/black background combinations.
The concept is simple: qcomb is a platform to "comb" your data and get it tidy to make fast & great decisions.
The same colors seem to work well for the classic square logos seen for mobile apps.
The color scheme was easy to pick. I always loved electric blue, so I put that into Coolors.co and it came up with this:
We then expanded to have a classic yellow/amber warning tone, and a green successful tone.
Overall, the core color palette is:
- F72585 Rose
- B5179E Purple
- 7209B7 Dark Purple
- 3F37C9 Dark Blue
- 4361EE Medium Blue
- 4895EF Light Blue
- 41EAD4 Turquoise
- FDE74C Maize Yellow
Fonts-wise, I am not a connoisseur so I resorted to copying other websites I like. In this case we will take inspiration from Gemini which suggests the classics: Montserrat, Lato, Roboto, etc. It’s the first time it has suggested Manrope to me so we’ll go with that to add a bit of personality of the application.
Word of the Day
Rollicking is an adjective used to decribe something happy, energetic and often noisy.
Arsenal are playing well! It might be rollicking fun to support them this year – said no one ever
I love how this word sounds, the ‘Roll’ sound paired with ‘ick’ makes for a striking pronunciation [/ˈrɒlɪkɪŋ/]. Also, it’s speculated it originates from merging two words that are cool on their own: roll and frolic!