5 ms·

For a personal project, the scope doesn't seem bad. There are a lot of edge cases in both e-commerce and food ordering, though. The delivery part is especially

by smt88 4y ago

For a personal project, the scope doesn't seem bad. There are a lot of edge cases in both e-commerce and food ordering, though. The delivery part is especially hairy. For a commercial project, the client is making a huge mistake by hiring you to build something new. There are a dazzling number of inexpensive solutions that already do this and handle the edge cases. None of those would cost nearly as much as building and maintaining this. There are also open-source options that would still be more expensive than using an existing SaaS, but still doable.

tannershmoog 4y ago
Yea the edge cases are what I am referring to when I say I've found it difficult to research. If you know of any resources on this I'd love to read them. I'm not opposed to letting some platforms do some of the work for me, but clicking and dragging on squarespace isnt a marketable skill, so I'd rather avoid that.
- smt88 4y ago
  > If you know of any resources on this I'd love to read them. I don't really know of anyone who would write about this. Part of it is predicting human behavior, and the rest of it is observation. For example, users make a lot of mistakes. They get part of an order wrong, and sometimes they don't realize it until the restaurant has begun making the order. How do you handle it? If the user can just cancel the order, the restaurant is losing money for a potentially fixable mistake. If the user can edit the order, how is that communicated to the restaurant? Ordering systems are bidirectional. Both words (what the user has ordered) and money are moving back and forth even after the transaction is complete. What happens if a user does a charge-back? What happens if a user is unhappy and wants a partial refund? It's just not something a beginner could accomplish in a reasonable amount of time. It would even take an expert quite a while to build it all out, even if she had it 100% architected in her head. > clicking and dragging on squarespace isnt a marketable skill, so I'd rather avoid that I agree, but that's a reason to follow a more traditional career path (working as a junior developer at a place that will teach you) rather than allowing a business to roll the dice on an experiment. It's honestly not really ethical. I've cleaned up messes made by beginners, and I've also encountered messes that were bad enough that no one could clean them up. It's not unlike an unlicensed contractor telling someone they can build something they've never built before. If you do it, you're taking advantage of their trust and ignorance, especially because there are tons of alternatives. Help this company implement an existing, trusted SaaS, put it on your resume as a consulting project, and find something else to work on. You won't advance your career by muddying your name on projects that are more harmful for a client than helpful.
  - tannershmoog 4y ago
    This is helpful. I guess it makes sense that there is no single answer to edge case handling, and it probably is more than I can handle to set up a payment processor on my own. As to the career path, I've had a lot of trouble getting my foot in the door anywhere. I have a bit of an employment gap for the last couple years of my university, and while I do have some I.T. and soft development experience this doesnt seem to be enough. The client is aware that I have no experience and my rate is adjusted according to the risk, even so I dont want to waste their time. That said, would you consider setting up an app with the shopify API to be using SaaS? This would still let me build out some of the front end with react rather than letting squarespace do everything, but from what I understand they handle a lot of the payment edge cases like chargebacks.

by smt88 4y ago

tannershmoog 4y ago

Yea the edge cases are what I am referring to when I say I've found it difficult to research. If you know of any resources on this I'd love to read them. I'm not opposed to letting some platforms do some of the work for me, but clicking and dragging on squarespace isnt a marketable skill, so I'd rather avoid that.

smt88 4y ago
> If you know of any resources on this I'd love to read them. I don't really know of anyone who would write about this. Part of it is predicting human behavior, and the rest of it is observation. For example, users make a lot of mistakes. They get part of an order wrong, and sometimes they don't realize it until the restaurant has begun making the order. How do you handle it? If the user can just cancel the order, the restaurant is losing money for a potentially fixable mistake. If the user can edit the order, how is that communicated to the restaurant? Ordering systems are bidirectional. Both words (what the user has ordered) and money are moving back and forth even after the transaction is complete. What happens if a user does a charge-back? What happens if a user is unhappy and wants a partial refund? It's just not something a beginner could accomplish in a reasonable amount of time. It would even take an expert quite a while to build it all out, even if she had it 100% architected in her head. > clicking and dragging on squarespace isnt a marketable skill, so I'd rather avoid that I agree, but that's a reason to follow a more traditional career path (working as a junior developer at a place that will teach you) rather than allowing a business to roll the dice on an experiment. It's honestly not really ethical. I've cleaned up messes made by beginners, and I've also encountered messes that were bad enough that no one could clean them up. It's not unlike an unlicensed contractor telling someone they can build something they've never built before. If you do it, you're taking advantage of their trust and ignorance, especially because there are tons of alternatives. Help this company implement an existing, trusted SaaS, put it on your resume as a consulting project, and find something else to work on. You won't advance your career by muddying your name on projects that are more harmful for a client than helpful.
- tannershmoog 4y ago
  This is helpful. I guess it makes sense that there is no single answer to edge case handling, and it probably is more than I can handle to set up a payment processor on my own. As to the career path, I've had a lot of trouble getting my foot in the door anywhere. I have a bit of an employment gap for the last couple years of my university, and while I do have some I.T. and soft development experience this doesnt seem to be enough. The client is aware that I have no experience and my rate is adjusted according to the risk, even so I dont want to waste their time. That said, would you consider setting up an app with the shopify API to be using SaaS? This would still let me build out some of the front end with react rather than letting squarespace do everything, but from what I understand they handle a lot of the payment edge cases like chargebacks.