SharedSaga Review
Intro
SharedSaga was the name of the start-up project that I pursued for 2 years from 2020 - 2022. The application was aiming to be a memory recording software oriented around capturing the life experiences of individuals and organizing the memories for a multi-generational group such as a family. I worked on the application as a sole-proprietor founder and learned a lot launching the application with NextJS, StrapiCMS, mongodb and AWS S3. I'm quite proud of the capabilities that I was able to add to the application in this time (some of which I will describe below) and I learned a lot about starting a software business. The most glaring deficiency that the experience highlighted for me was my lack of familiarity with the process of going to market with my product and this lead me to my next role as a marketing web developer for Conga.
Sofware Overview
SharedSaga was centered around a timeline interface of the user's life. They could add memories to the timeline and attach images, videos, audio and blog-like posts to the memory. Timelines were then organized into a family tree shape. Tagging other members of the family would populate those memories onto those users' timelines as well. The goal was to create a place for long-term storage of the stories composing a family history. The form interfaces that I created for easy and intuitive input of complex multimedia memory data ended up being the most complex web development that I have done.
Key Features
Timeline
SharedSaga users would add memories to their own or family member profiles and those memories would be displayed on the relevant users' timelines. The timeline featured centrally on a user's profile and would respond to a user's mouse movement allowing them to scrub through the life history of the target user and quickly find memories in their life timeline. The mouse timeline had a visual effect responding to the mouse's location and this was achieved using a JS canvas and the p5JS library. Clicks on the timeline were interpreted as dates and emitted from the canvas in order to show any memories from that region of the target user's life.
Shared Family S3 File Storage
File storage for the SharedSaga application was accomplished using AWS S3. Each family group that was added to the application would also be granted their own own access key which would permit them to access files only in their own group.
Stripe Payment Integration
Payment for use of SharedSaga was possible with a Stripe payment integration. Users could find the option to sign up for a paid account in their account settings and then be routed to a Stripe payment page which was branded like the application. After payment was completed the application would route back to the SharedSaga user account settings page seemlessly making it difficuly for the layperson to discern that they had ever left our website. Webhooks configured in our back-end nodeJS CMS StrapiJS were configured to receive a call from Stripe and update the user's group to a paid membership until the subscription period of 1 year had lapsed. A long subscription period was used in view of the long term nature of the application's intent. Additionally, our payment modal was designed around a single user paying for the whole family of users in their group because preserving the family history is usually motivated by older family members
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