How Do You Design Your Web App After Reaching MVP?

At Rackless, we feel the best design involves both software development and user experience. Those 2 components will get you 80% of the way to achieving good design for your Minimal Viable Product. To get the rest of the way there, use tools like Figma to collaborate with your software developer to emulate other websites and apps you admire.

How did Rackless’ FAQ Become Rich Results SEO Ready?

In working with TheHopeLine.com, Rackless' internal software developers worked to develop an innovative approach to implementing Google's FAQ Rich Results SEO Schema for this FAQ section. TheHopeLine and other clients at Rackless now use this innovative approach.

CTO vs CIO: What’s The Difference?

The Chief Technology Officer leads the software development efforts for a company. The Chief Information Officer is responsible for purchasing software and designing the corporate systems and processes used.

CIO vs IT Director: How Are They Different?

Often a company uses the title IT Director when the company either doesn't develop software and a title with the word Officer isn't politically acceptable. The title Chief Information Officer is used to signal the person speaks on behalf for the company regarding strategy with shareholders, board members, media and more.

Where are Rackless’ Software Developers Located?

Rackless' software developers are distributed between 3 primary locations: India, North America and South America. With recruiting software developers around the globe, Rackless clients can staff their software development team across three 8-hour shifts. This allows them to achieve an almost 24 hours/day software development cycle.

What Is A Minimum Viable Product (MVP)?

The term Minimum Viable Product was developed by Eric Ries in his book Lean Startup. Eric defines MVP as follows: A minimum viable product (MVP) is the "version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort."

What are the Most Popular Programming Languages?

The most popular programming languages can be broken down into 4 categories: website frontend, web-based application backend, mobile app development and embedded systems. JavaScript, HTML and CSS are the most popular website frontend programming languages. For web-based application backend, JavaScript, Python, PHP, C# and Ruby are the most popular programming languages. JavaScript, Kotlin, Java, C# and Swift are the most popular programming languages used for mobile app development. For embedded systems, popular programming languages are C, C++, Python, Java, Rust, Ada, JavaScript, B+, Go, C#, Lua, Assembly and Forth.

If You Build It, Will They Come?

In building software or starting any new endeavor, you may face taunts of lunacy just like Ray faced in the movie Field of Dreams. Jeff Bezos has shared that he uses the Regret Minimization Framework in helping him make decisions like whether to build or not to build. Rather than focus on whether they will come, trust in knowing that if you 'don't' build it, they, most definitely, won't come.

Should We Use A Software Framework?

Software frameworks help product owners, entrepreneurs, and executives get their software apps up and running quickly. Why? Because a software framework is a collection of code maintained by expert software developers that serve as the foundation for your own software.

Laravel, Rails, or Express.js: Which Framework’s Better?

We recommend Laravel over Ruby on Rails (Ruby) and Express.js (JavaScript/Node.js). We chose Laravel ourselves for our own internal software project, recently after comparing these same 3 software frameworks. In selecting Laravel, we chose to build our app using the software language PHP. PHP has the largest market share of all the web-based software languages (close to 80% of all websites use PHP). Also, Laravel is the fastest-growing software framework based on PHP making it a wise choice.

Behind The Scenes: Switching to .APP, Preparing Integrations and More

In today’s ‘Behind The Scenes’ with Micky from Rackless, he shows us 7 conversations: 1 message and 6 tasks he works through with his software developers Isha and Kulvir. In this conversation, Micky demos the new Tag feature, he brainstorms how to pull dynamic values from Rackless.app into Rackless.com using JSON, removes the Team feature which just isn’t coming together as he hoped, and more.

In this episode of Behind The Scenes, you will see Micky’s continued focus on building a Minimal Viable Product where he can. Technically, Micky and his team are replacing 2 other tickets systems they currently use: Assembla and Jira. With Assembla raising their rates by over 10x their original rates in the last 2 years and Jira treating DevOps tickets differently that development and IT tickets, Micky is focusing his energy on building Rackless’ own ticket tracking system named Rackless App.

Also in this ‘Behind The Scenes’, Micky starts laying the foundation for integrating TimeDoctor which tracks the work that Micky and the team perform.

Video Transcript

Micky Thompson (00:00)

Hey, this is Micky, and back today for ‘Behind the Scenes’ where we’re just going to work through some tickets today, I have one message from one of our developers and six tasks that I want to work on a day. So let’s go ahead and jump in and take a look at this message that we have

Micky Thompson (00:20)

Okay. So, right here is the one message that I saw when I logged in. So we’re going to go into Rackless.app and we’re going to look at and one of the, we do have a bug where we have to do fix this. We redid our homepage as well as some of our filters. So what I’m gonna have to do is manually go ahead and set these values so that I have them all correct. We’ll narrow it down the reckless app. Okay. So even when you’re building your own app and you’re experienced as I am, you still have to go through some bugs that, you know, are going to be fixed. But in the name of agile, we’ll just keep moving forward. So I’ve got Kulvir working on the filter, and that dashboard. We’re gonna… She may even have responded to one of the tickets regarding that change.

Micky Thompson (01:18)

So here we have ticket 94. How should we pull by use from Rackless App system values page into our website? So this is a message I sent to Isha last night. And what I’m trying to do is we have a page inside Rackless A pp, where we store the number of developers that have worked for us as well as the hours worked. And so here, what I’m asking her is how do we pull these values? And so here, I’ve taken a screenshot of staging.rackless.com, which is our main website. And here are these values we’re pulling from WordPress. And what we want to do is pull them from this values page, where we’re tracking them in Rackless app. And so let’s see what she says here. We can use a simple URL to fetch the Jason data as there is no off the required… TimeDoctor just popped up in my way.

Micky Thompson (02:14)

That’s another app we’re testing. It will work, like just need to hit the URL and we will get the JSON data of developers hours and this can be fetched from another website. So here, what she’s doing is she’s using JSON, JSON, if you’ve ever heard of XML, it’s very similar. So what we’re doing is we’re creating a page that basically just displays data using a JSON. If you’ve worked with Excel and you’ve saved as a CSV file, JSON is a alternative to a CSV file. So I lik e her thinking. So I’m gonna go ahead and just reply. So we’ll go ahead and pause and I’ll write this real fast.

Micky Thompson (03:06)

Okay. So I’m back and I’ve sent the message back to Isha just said, thank you. Let’s go ahead and implement that for staging.rackless.com. So we’ll close out of this ticket and now what we’ll do is we’ll switch over to those tasks. I don’t remember the number… Six. So, just see it right here now. So here add TimeDoctor page to system section. So this is continuing some of the administrative functions inside of Rackless App. Here, what we’re going to do is we’re going to integrate TimeDoctor into Rackless App. Now TimeDoctor is a time tracking tool that we use at Rackless to measure our work performed. That’s why you saw that app appear earlier. So here, all I’m doing is asking Isha to create a coming soon page for TimeDoctor. So we’ll go ahead and just test that real fast. So I’ll be right back.

Micky Thompson (04:11)

Okay. So I just tested it on staging.rackless.app. And, I went into the system section, which is an administrative section that we use to administer the app and I see TimeDoctor and the page is ‘coming soon’. So that means I can proceed with the next stage of integrating TimeDoctor into our app. So what I’ve done is I’ve marked that ticket as a ready to go live. And so now we’ll move on to the next ticket.

Micky Thompson (04:49)

Okay. So I did notice after I refreshed that another ticket has appeared, so, and we’re still at six, so that means the developer sent us a ticket while we were testing that one. So we’ll go ahead and pick up this next ticket. This next ticket has removed Teams column from Accounts page. Now you, haven’t got to see the Accounts page. We had this idea originally of doing accounts and teams. But instead we’re going to simplify this, we’re going to remove the Teams feature at least for now and keep it simple and just stick with accounts. We realized the complexity that having nested teams caused in accounts that we just weren’t ready to handle. We want to stay Minimal Viable Product. So what I’ve done here is I’ve asked Isha to remove all the teams as well as remove that column. So she’s removed all the teams, also removed Team, the Team accounts from the staging website. So please check out, go test that real fast. Okay. So here I am in Safari on the accounts page and we see that Team’s columns gone. We also see all the teams within those accounts are gone, so I can go ahead and mark this ticket as done.

Micky Thompson (06:06)

Okay. So, I’ve marked this ticket as Done and we’re ready to, well, I’m sorry I said… Said done. What I meant was to go live with this ticket. So this ticket is ready to go live, but we’ll go ahead and refresh our page and we’ll see what’s next.

Micky Thompson (06:22)

Okay. So we have ticket number 91 here, and the goal for this ticket, please remove the following items from the account page. Now the account page, since we’re getting rid of teams, a lot of features that were related to teams, or that were just complex that we don’t want to address right now, they were ideas I had, we really just had placeholders there. I’m just removing them from the screen. So they don’t confuse users in the future. And so she let me know that she’s removed them. So now we’re just down to where we can edit the name. So I’ll go real fast and test this inside of a Safari.

Micky Thompson (07:01)

Okay. So I was able to test this in Safari and it works great. So what I did was I just went ahead and told Isha, let’s go live with this change and I signed the ticket back to her. Okay. So we’ll go ahead and refresh. So we got four more left to do. So we’ll go in here and do new tab. Okay. So here we have filter conversation, according to tags I’m moved the tech functionality of the live website. Okay. So this is a new feature inside of Rackless App where we can now tag conversations. So we borrowed this feature from WordPress, where tags are very popular. And so what it allows us to do, I can actually do this in the live website. Let’s think of a tag. Oh, well, we’ll go in here and we’ll just tag this one with ‘Tag’, or she actually has one already here ‘Tagtest’. So if I come over here to conversations, I should see Tagtest in here. There we go. And now there’s the Tagtest. And then if I come in here and I read and I go in here to tags, I can actually remove that tag. And so go ahead and press save.

Micky Thompson (08:15)

And now up here under conversations, you’ll notice that that Tag no longer appears for that. I removed it from all the conversations. So here’s tags. So what I could do, I wanna say T stays there. That’s a bug that we have. I got Kulvir working on that. Okay. So I’ve got to do all the Assignees and do all the Accounts. Hm. Maybe it’s marked as Done. There. It is save changes. So I’ll go in here… I’m going to remove this one. Alright.

Micky Thompson (08:56)

So now what I can do is come in here and we’ll go and look up, but T is sticking because of, okay. So add feature Tag input. Okay. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to go in here and I’m going to add Tags to all of these, and we should have type ahead if it’s ever been used before. So Tags… We’ll go ahead and press save, but I could do could go ahead and open all of these.

Micky Thompson (09:29)

Alright, so let’s see. Did I get that one? No, which one did I do? Tags… oh, you know what? I forgot to hit enter after it. Okay. You got to do that. We need to think about that. So, let’s go down here to Tag… Hit enter… And then let’s come over here. Let’s go to Tags… Then hit enter. So, you over here…

Micky Thompson (10:25)

Okay. So. I’ve got all of these, all of those Tags. So now when I come in here and I select the filter and I go to Tags, we now get filtered down to Tags. So then I can come in here and see if there’s any that are still in the, In Progress stage. Which that one let’s see… Let’s see this one… I think this was a task. Oh yeah, that was the ticket. I was just testing… Let’s see, this is where she went live with it. I can go ahead and mark this as done. I’ll go ahead and do that. I’ll be right back.

Micky Thompson (11:05)

Okay. So I’m back and a we’ve marked this ticket as done. I’m gonna go ahead and go back and let’s see what our tickets are waiting for us. So we’re now down to three more. Let’s go ahead and take a look at this one… At times on created report it and assigned to history of conversation. So what we did here was we wanted it so that we measure when a ticket, we record in the history tab, when a ticket is created, who it was reported by and when was it and who was it assigned? And so here, what we’ve done is I’ve gone back and forth with Isha a couple of times and getting the wording right. Originally we were just going to say what happened and then the date, but then I decided let’s make it more sentence form. So here she’s given me an example, she added the word on and add to the date time used in history, please check and confirm on staging site.

Micky Thompson (12:00)

So what happens here is it says Layla Thompson assigned the conversation on August 12, 2020 at 5:59:41 seconds PM UTC. Right now, we’re just using UTC time in the future. Under your profile, you’ll be able to assign your timezone. And so here at Micky created it, Isha reported it and Layla was assigned. And so one of the things we do inside Rackless is when you create a new ticket, you can actually create a ticket on someone else’s behalf. So I could, Kara could call me on the phone and say “Hey, Micky, can you create this ticket for me?” And I can do it, report it from Kara, assign it to someone. But the system knows that it was me that created it own Kara’s behalf. Had it been me that created it. And I reported it. That would have been in one sentence. It would’ve said “Micky Thompson created and reported the conversation.” So we combine those two in one sentence, when that happens I’m going to go ahead and take Isha screenshot’s word for it, to kind of cause there’s no damage in going live with this and in the future, if I see anything that we want to change about it and we’ll do it then but we’ll go ahead and tell her to go live with this. So I’ll be right back.

Micky Thompson (13:23)

Okay. So I’ve marked this ticket ready to go live and I’ve sent it back to Isha. We’ll go ahead and close this out. We’ll refresh and we’ll see the next ticket. We have. ‘Change Rackless.Io to Rackless.app and removing WordPress.’ So originally we had Rackless.app and rackless.io on the same server to test to see how we liked that we saw some performance issues. So we’ve decided now to split the app and the WordPress into separate websites. This ticket is actually done because you can see I’m working from Rackless.app. There was a bug with one of our vendor, so she was reporting to me what the vendor said about that. I’ll read that real fast and I’ll be right back.

Micky Thompson (14:09)

Okay. I’m back. And one of our partners is Forge… Laravel Forge hosts some of our websites. And we didn’t notice that we had this old website still hosted on one of our servers because it’s pulling from the same repo or where we store the source code. It’s causing an issue, so, she’s asked me to delete this. I’m going to go ahead and just uninstalled the code from it. But I thought that you could get to see some of this behind the scenes. So what I’m gonna do is uninstalled any code from this website specifically, I’m already moved the SSL and did that before I started the recording. Now we’re gonna go down here to Meta and I’m going to leave this server or delete this site, not server because it’s actually running our other. So, I’m gonna go ahead and copy that and confirm, and that’s server… That site is now deleted. So I’ll go ahead and let Kulvir know. And then she’s also waiting on a response from Forge on the error message that we’re getting. So I’ll let her know to let me know when she finds out.

Micky Thompson (15:11)

Okay. So we’ve got that site deleted from this server and it’s showing as being removed. I’ve also responded back to Kulvir. Thanks for spotting that I have not yet deleted that site from that server. And then I assigned the ticket back to her so she can let me know what forge says about that fpmlock file that we’re having issues with. We believe we resolved it by cleaning up some of the sites that were using the same source code that may have been conflicting whenever it deployed. But we’ll hear back from Laravel what they say about that issue. Okay. So we have one more ticket left. Oh yeah. This was one that I spotted the other day. This was kind of a complex bug that I sent to Kulvir. So what was happening was ticket number 77 was related to number 72. But when you went to number 72, it was not related back to 77.

Micky Thompson (16:00)

So I brought that up with her. She said, I tried to recreate the above issue at my end, but it seems to be working well. If I go to 77, I can see that as related to 72. And if I go to 72, I can see those relate to 77 and a few other tickets as well. Reason behind the issue on rackless.io can be some script related or something due to cache. But as we have shifted to Rockwell thought app, now issue isn’t there as far as I have checked. Please, check and let me know if you’re facing any issue. So this helps verifies that I’m moving rackless.app to its own server and its own domain, we were seeing some cache issues from WordPress mixing with Laravel. So this seems to have resolved our problem. What I’ll do is go and look at ticket number… Let’s see, I’ll have to go to the new app. So what I’ll do is go rackless.app forward slash. I’ll get rid of this app here. Okay. So if I scroll down to the bottom and we see 75 is related, so it was 72. Hmm.

Micky Thompson (17:14)

Okay. So if I go, let’s see am I on the right one, says 77. Okay. And the title, I said 77 was related to 72. Okay. So now it’s showing 75. So I’ll go to 75. Okay, 75 is related back to 77. So that’s good. Let’s go look at 72 and just see what it was showing. I gotta fix this because we’ve changed the URL since then. So just get rid of this dot io. Okay. 72

Micky Thompson (17:50)

Is showing related to 75, 77. So let’s go to 75 Sydney 72. Okay. Now that’s the problem because… 75 is not reciprocating back to 72. I’ll go ahead and pause. I’ll record this for Isha so she can see it. Alright. Kulvir. So she can see it. I’ll be right back.

Micky Thompson (18:21)

Okay, so what I’ve done is responded back to Kulvir and told her that I found another example of this issue. 72 is related to 75, but 75 is not related back to 72. And so this just gives her more information to research on. I didn’t go and find any more examples of this because this one is just enough. As we work through this ticket and try to isolate what this bug is… Just one piece of information was enough. I gave her some earlier. Now she has a second piece of information she can go through and use to help her with this. So, I assigned this ticket back to her. So if we come back over here, I’ll close out of all these tickets we should be done. And we are!

Micky Thompson (19:07)

So, Thanks for letting me share with you behind the scenes of how we work with our software developers at Rackless to build a great product at rackless.app. And you got to see some behind the scenes look forward to bringing you some more in the future. You have a good rest of the day! Thanks!