I'm a web developer of a small, local SaaS web application. It currently has about a half-dozen clients.
As I continue to design the application, it's become increasingly harder for me to convince myself to commit any time to the project, which has happened in the beginning phase. Having grown attached to the project and the code I've already written, I'm scared that all additional work I commit will be overturned in the near future, when the app turns out to not scale well as the business grows.
As a university student applying for internships, I've had employers question my choice in not using any web frameworks during interviews, which has only caused me to further doubt my previous work. I simply don't know any web frameworks, and don't know which one to start using.
I've landed an internship as a full-stack developer in January, where I'll begin to learn front-end frameworks, but the pressure to finish the app is mounting, and I'm considering scrapping the app completely and starting over, which is something I've done before. The app currently is built in PHP and jQuery (for AJAX calls) and uses MySQL for its database. Any thoughts on how I can overcome this mental block, and to ensure my app will be scalable? Thanks in advance.
Best Answer
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Or put another way, don't worry about it today. If your app does what it needs to do, then it's fine. It's not a bad thing to rewrite parts of software further down the line; by that point you 1) know more clearly what you're trying to build and 2) know which bits are actually the bottleneck. You could spend an enormous amount of time writing an app which would scale to a million users, but it wouldn't be any better for your current six customers than what you've got today.