Hello again, for the second post of the 'Build with Me Larachat' Serie, where we build together a real time messaging app in Laravel 🤌 !

In the last article, I explained and defined the goals and functionalities of the package including realtime messaging, direct and group chats, attachement uploads for the V1 and many other advanced features for the V2.
You can check it here

What I did from the last article till today

Let's first, forget that I had two weeks off from work And that I took seriously my vacation in consideration 😗
I created the base structure of my package including the config folder, src, routes and database folders...

But what I did after that is what I think a mistake many developpers do when creating a product ( Saas, package... )

The Mistake 🥁

From the beginning, I wanted to anticipate everything, all the possible needs and features I will potentially ( or not ) need in the future versions.
This lead me to overcomplicated database and architecture, but that is not the real problem, sometime you need to deal with these architecture that gives you headaches... Nooo !!

My mistake was forgetting that I needed to build the product itself. I spent so much time trying to find the best and most optimized architecture that I completely overlooked the product.

As developers, we always want to make sure everything is good in terms of architecture, testability and error handling, and this is in fact a good thing, but we need to think as well in term of product, and sometime overcomplicating it can lead us to nowhere or even worst and never launch the product you worked on it so hard 😢

The Conclusion

Launch it for god's sake

Just build the first version of your product and launch it, it can be an MVP ( Minimum viable product ), a prototype, or just a simple conception, just publish and ship fast while keeping it well structured to avoid technical debt ( especially if you will keep your codebase like me ), it's a skill that we all need to work on it as developpers.

What's next ?

During the week I will focus on the Message and Group Chats Logic and keep you updated on the evolution

You can follow me on other platforms like X and Discord for the community !