Project "Later"

Background (May 2022)

As an IT Project Manager, I had to look for a new destination after a company reorganization.

In order to use the available time meaningfully while finding new work, I have defined a personal project: "Later".

The project had the following objectives:

• easily gain and maintain insight into my long-term financial forecast

• learn to build a mobile App without much technical knowledge and experience in this specific field

• to remain "sharp" for a possible continuation in the labor market

And so the personal assignment arose to develop an App within a year that would allow me to easily estimate and monitor whether I (as a 59 year old) will be able to make ends meet financially in the long term.

Application requirements

• The application had to meet at least the following global requirements:

• simple mobile user interface with input of only the bare essentials

• secure storage of the entered data

• support for a household with multiple people

• intelligent assessment of price indexation as an important factor for asset development

• graphical representation of the forecasts

• to easily see the effect of changes (what if scenarios).

Resources used

The App is realized with the help of Flutter. This is an open source framework from Google to build Apps for various platforms with the underlying programming language Dart.

Project progress (lead time)

• Phase 1: Building basic knowledge of Flutter (3 months)

• Phase 2: Realization of a Minimum Viable Product for personal use (4 months)

• Phase 3: Improving quality for public use (4 months)

• Phase 4: Preparation and roll-out in the Play Store (1 month)

The original ambition was to not go beyond phase 2, but the journey didn't feel complete without also making the journey to the PlayStore.

It was a fun and educational process and if I can make someone else happy with it, I will be more than satisfied.

Continued (May 2024)

To bridge a (new) period to find a client and because it is simply fun to continue learning and improving, I have decided to continue developing the app as long as time permits.

See the planned backlog of new features.