Can I make a better Twitter List Manager?
Stating the obvious
As anyone who has attempted to learn something new in the IT world will attest, without a goal or aim you quickly find yourself procrastinating and just clicking around randomly. You don't really know what you are trying to do and end up doing pretty much nothing. One of the hardest tasks for any kind of "start-up" project is setting yourself some goals and realistic expectations for what you want and can achieve...
Challenge Accepted
I'm not currently directly involved with any UI5 customer work, so anything I do in this area is mostly in my own time and for my own gain. So, I needed to find something productive to do with my UI5 focus - I also wanted to try and build something that others may actually find useful (for a change!) As a further twist, I wanted to do something that was a little away from the usual SAP world, i.e. I didn't want to just show PO header & line items with an approve/reject button. :wink: On top of all that, I wanted to add a flavour to the blog series of how I typically approach the development lifecycle of a solution, picking up on some things I've learned and adapted to my own use from Agile, Design Thinking, etc. and other more technical paradigms.
What to build?
I've used Twitter for a few years now and have got to a decent number of both followers and followings, meaning organising my feeds, lists, etc. is nigh on impossible. I've tried to use list managers I've found via Google but to no avail. So, I thought I'd try to use the Twitter API, combined with a nice UI5 front-end to build a better list manager. At this stage, I have absolutely no idea whether I can even come close to achieving what I've set out to, as I know next to nothing about the Twitter API and almost as little about UI5 development. The coming months will be interesting...
Blogging as I go...
I'm trying to be more active with my blogging here on SCN, and whilst I have my other main series in progress here I thought I'd capture my adventure with Twitter and UI5 in another series, of which this is Part 1. It isn't going to just focus on the UI5 tech stuff though (sorry?!) but the whole journey from inception of idea, through to completion of at least a working prototype. I wanted to make a "proper" blog. It's inspired a little by matt.harding's great series about his "Fiori Like Challenge" that started here.
I'm hoping that as a journey, I get to discover, explore and share some useful knowledge/tools/methods/resources here on SCN and at the bare minimum I end up with a decent record of my efforts to look back on. I'd really appreciate others taking the time to give feedback, less so on the UI5 technical side of things but more so on the approach, methodology and tools mentioned and used. Hopefully we'll all gain something from this.
Please head on over to the next posting in this series - UI5 & Twitter - Designing the Solution
Footnote
As an aside, as I have been writing and researching more and more I've obviously been more conscious about the images I use, taking a lead from this great blog post by tom.vandoorslaer. I've noticed that Google's "Free to use or share" option in the advanced search pane isn't quite 100% clear, in that lots of the images it identifies still have some sort of license, often a Creative Commons one. Typically you only realise this if you drill down into the image and check the source website a bit. As a result of researching around this for this post, I discovered this website that acts as a front-end to multiple search engines and hopefully helps you better find content that is free to use and share. It is still early days so I don't know how useful it will turn out to be...
Image sources
In line with my footnote above, here are the few credits for images in this post:
| Image | Author | Link | License |
|---|---|---|---|
| Obvious | Bill Selak | Flickr | Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic |
| Blogging? | Anonymous Account | Flickr | Attribution 2.0 Generic |
Links
UI5 & Twitter API - A Personal Challenge (this post)
- SAP Managed Tags:
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