## Don't be afraid of Wix  --- ## What's more important to you when evaluating a project to work on? 1. Value to the user 2. What you learn Type it in the chat Can someone explain why.. --- ### Some advice from a CTO "When you're choosing projects to work on, care about two things: 1. What you learn 2. The value to the user" --- But if you have to choose one, **choose value to the user** Credit Marco Monteiro, former CTO of Rekki --- ### My Github is full of mostly unfinished, mostly useless projects  ---  --- If you spend a weekend half building a social network for dogs who play poker using Svelt js, Reinforcement learning and Assembly, all deployed on a drone.. ..that's never **not** going to be awesome!  But why should we be using Wix? --- ### Zinc Zinc is a London-based business builder that runs 9 month mission-led programmes to build scalable commercial impact-led businesses. Current mission: Add five high-quality years to later life Tony and I (both FAC17 spent 6 months working here) --- ## Lessons from building five 'Tech for Better' projects in 6 months --- ### Project One - Game Academy Game Academy - "Playing games could get you a better job." What: Building a dashboard to display points built up  --- ### Using a library for our grids  --- ### Result Looked cool, learned a lot but wasn't deployed and as far as I know, hasn't been used. Why: They had a specific API built entirely online using Python. In the time available, we were too afraid to get our hands dirty with it and we wanted to reinforce our React knowledge **Learning rating: 8 Value to founders: 3** --- ## Project Two  ---  What: We built a mobile app that connected to sensors embedded in pants, and displayed your pelvic floor contraction. --- ### Updating a graph with the scanned reading ```=javascript React.useEffect(() => { const subscription = manager.onStateChange(deviceState => { console.log("State is", deviceState); setDeviceBLE(deviceState); if (deviceState === "PoweredOn") { scanAndConnect(); } }, true); }, [requestConnection]); ``` --- <img style="float: left;" src="https://i.imgur.com/LnIMcat.png"> Result: Randall, Tony and I were the only users of this version. But it was used in presentations, it was used as a base for next version and Samson are doing really well on the next version. **Learning rating: 10 Value to founder: 5** --- ### Project Three - BetterSpace chat application  --- ### Displaying messages in React Native ```=javascript {messagesToDisplay.map(msg => ( <Text>{msg.author.username}: {msg.content}</Text> ))} ``` --- ### Result It's live in the app store and includes the chat function we worked with, hopefully people are using it. Learning rating: 10 Value to founders: 8 --- ### Project Four - Untangle  --- ### Sorry FAC19, yes this is a callback inside a Promise ```=javascript export default function createNewMessage(channel, textMessage) { return new Promise((resolve, reject) => { channel.sendUserMessage(textMessage, (message, error) => { if (error) { console.log(error) reject(error) } else { resolve(message) } }); }) } ``` --- ### Result It's being used by beta testers and launching soon. They received a £50k grant from Innovate UK (hopefully partly to do with the progress of the app). Learning rating: 10 Value to founders: 9 --- ### Project Five - Diaspo  --- ### We helped automate their whole service using Wix  --- ### We did write sooooome code.. ```=javascript import wixLocation from 'wix-location'; $w.onReady(function () { $w("#button106").onClick((event) => { let myValue = $w("#input9").value; wixLocation.to("https://joindiaspo.com/preferences?email=" + myValue) }) }) ``` ---  (pre-covid!) Wix is used today and I still all the time get booking email notifications **Learning rating: 3 Value to founder: 10** ..and the reason for this talk... --- ### If we aren't at least open to Wix in certain circumstances... #### maybe we are thinking too much about learning.. #### and not enough about value... --- ### Help me FAC19...  #### Two questions I don't have good answers to --- ### Question one How do we make the most of times when most valuable option for the user involves using Wix, or using php?  --- ### Question two How do we learn the things we want to learn and don't know, while still creating value?  --- ### Finally... three parting thoughts --- ### 1/3 I have already made more bad decisions relating to: - problem identification - choosing the right approach to a project than serious technical mistakes --- ### 2/3 The value to your Tech For Better client will probably be decided more in design week than in your build sprint weeks A partially useful thing usually beats a fully not-useful thing --- ### 3/3 We're all always thinking about our technical skills, and it's important But value to our clients/users is also important And FAC training prepares us extremely well for that ---