Okay, so, “river valley psychological services,” huh? Let me tell you, this was a journey and a half. I basically started from zero, just knowing I wanted to build something useful for this psychological services place. They needed a better way to manage their appointments and client info. Paperwork was everywhere, and honestly, it was a mess.
First thing I did? I researched. I spent a solid week just looking at different appointment scheduling softwares and CRM systems already out there. I wanted to see what the standard features were, what people liked, and most importantly, what they hated. I noted down a bunch of pain points and features that I thought would be a good fit for River Valley’s specific needs. This involved a lot of Googling, reading reviews, and even trying out a few free trials. Let me tell you, some of those UIs were atrocious!
Then came the planning phase. I grabbed a whiteboard (yes, a real one!) and started sketching out the basic structure. I figured we needed:
- A secure client database
- An easy-to-use appointment scheduler
- A way to track client progress notes
- Some kind of reporting feature to see how things were going.
I literally drew boxes and arrows all over the place, figuring out how each part would connect to the others. It looked like a crazy person’s conspiracy board, but hey, it worked for me!
Next up? The coding. I decided to use a MERN stack – MongoDB for the database, * for the backend, React for the frontend, and * for the runtime environment. It’s what I’m most comfortable with, and I knew I could get it up and running relatively quickly. I set up my development environment, created the basic project structure, and started building out the API endpoints. This part was a lot of trial and error. There were definitely some moments where I wanted to throw my laptop out the window, especially when I was wrestling with CORS errors or trying to figure out why my data wasn’t saving correctly.
Designing the front-end was surprisingly tricky. I wanted something clean, intuitive, and not intimidating. I spent way too much time fiddling with color palettes and font sizes. I ended up using a pre-built component library (Material UI, if you must know) to speed things up and make sure everything looked professional. The appointment scheduler component was a real challenge – getting the dates and times to display correctly and preventing double-bookings took some serious debugging.
Then came the testing. Oh man, the testing. I wrote a bunch of unit tests to make sure each function was doing what it was supposed to, and then I did a bunch of manual testing to make sure the whole system worked together seamlessly. I got a few of my friends to try it out and give me feedback, which was invaluable. They found a bunch of bugs that I had completely missed. Like that one time when deleting an appointment would accidentally delete the client’s profile too? Yeah, that was a fun one to fix.
Finally, after weeks of coding, debugging, and refining, I had something that actually worked! I deployed it to a cloud server (AWS, because why not?), set up the database, and configured the security settings. I showed it to the folks at River Valley, and they were actually impressed. They started using it right away, and they’ve been giving me feedback ever since. There are still a few kinks to work out, but overall, it’s been a huge success.
The biggest takeaway? Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty. Just jump in, start coding, and figure things out as you go. And don’t be afraid to ask for help when you get stuck. There’s a whole community of developers out there who are happy to lend a hand. Also, coffee. Lots and lots of coffee.
