Minimum Viable Product
Whatever you want to call it: Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Minimum Viable Experiment, Simple Lovable and Complete.
I’m putting my nose to the grindstone this month to get the PKB rolling. In doing so I’ve been thinking about what the Viable in MVP should be. Basically, if my end-goal is an extensible personal knowledge base, what is the first step that gets me closer to that goal. Closer, in this case, does not mean I won’t be taking a step back from my current tool of choice, OneNote. I obviously cannot set the initial bar at exceeding all of the functionality of OneNote, so there will be regressions.
What I’m thinking an initial MVP will look like is the following:
- A simple text editor interface
- Each note is store inside the database
- Markdown functionality as a plugin
These 3 qualities would allow me to easily test the following:
- Working with text views in Qt
- Working with the database
- Testing out ideas on how the plugins will hook into the program
I’ve been thinking that the sooner I get to the point that I can trust that I won’t lose any data, the sooner I can start dogfooding the PKB. Even if the functionality and utility is far from what I ultimately want, if I am using it daily, I’ll more quickly figure out what needs to be improve, and be more likely to fix those pain points sooner.
Thinking about a MVP reminds me very much of discussions with a thoughtful group of individuals that were driven towards the same aim back in 2014, after being called together by an excellent blog post, over at A Curious Mix.