The Past
Before talking about where Cue is, let’s do a quick review of where Cue came from.
About a year ago, I started looking into a really interesting company called Blockstack. They’re looking to provide decentralized, private, secure identification and storage using blockchains.
I was fascinated by the idea, as it seems a much more relevant and interesting application of blockchains than replacing money. Maybe I just don’t care about money enough.
Anyway, I followed the company as they added features, and decided to play with their developer API a bit.
On a parallel track, I’ve been working on building my own habits for years now, and systematizing processes for getting things done deliberately each day. I finally connected the two, and decided to build a tool to complement that system, on top of Blockstack.
Diving into the work was easy, because Blockstack is great for just fiddling: no servers required! At least at first.
So I took their sample todo app and fleshed out a first pass at Cue. No need to worry about login, registration, or storage. At least at first.
Well, a couple months ago, when I first showed it off (rough as it was) to friends, it quickly became apparent that I needed to do more than Blockstack is currently capable of handling. The big problem that I really need to solve is sync and caching of data. People who use todo apps, or planning apps, expect them to magically sync across devices without any real issues. Blockstack may eventually get there, but it doesn’t have a solution for this yet, and the existing open source options out there don’t integrate with it yet. Since I’m a one-man operation, I need to outsource these kinds of things as much as possible, so I can focus on the core vision of Cue.
The Present
So the last month has been focused on fleshing out a more traditional SaaS backend for Cue. That means it needs identity management (Okta), storage (Digital Ocean spaces), and a backend api server to connect the two (Digital Ocean droplets). All so that I can plug in a sync/caching layer.
Along the way I’m learning a ton.
The Future
It’s not ready to go live yet, but should be by the end of August, possibly sooner. When it is, on to sync/caching so that Cue will automagically sync across devices as well as work in offline mode.
And that will be done, so that I can get back to the core vision. The next step of that will be adding tickler support.
I can’t wait.