Making a Trello board for better project management

My SLTP 2020 Walkthrough: Part 3

Photo by Alvaro Reyes on Unsplash

Continuing from my previous article in the SLTP series, I have one thing in mind right now, in the context of the first step in building the APIs.

I want to make a computer program that will create content and share it on social media. We found out before that deep learning can help us a bit in the same. I also noticed that there are other ways to create content without always using deep learning. Curating content will be equally useful. We will explore that as well. I will be modifying and pivot my requirements as and when I discover something new.

For the sake of simplicity in this tutorial series, I thought to divide the entire project into multiple phases. For the next few articles, we will be focusing only on phase 1.

Phase 1 includes the following features-

• Generate artistic or processed images.
• Generate news posters containing information on the latest news articles.
• Generate social media content for the above news posters.
• Post the content created on various social media handles.

That’s it. This should make things quite simple for now.

So how exactly did I come to this conclusion to generate news posters?

I began thinking, what kind of content do I want to create? One thing I already had in mind was poetry, but now I decided to keep it in a future plan and experiment with something simpler. I noticed that I want to be able to share regular news updates via The Research Nest’s social media handles. I already do this manually from time to time when I come across interesting news. What if the entire flow is now automated? This is the feature I will be focusing on. My program will be able to share the latest news along with a custom-designed poster with the followers even when I am sleeping.

This brings me back to my question-based learning approach, once again. What kind of application will make my (or your users) day to day activities easier? That’s where you can get your feature ideas.

As you can see, this feature requires 3 things-

• Fetching of latest news updates from somewhere.
• Generating some short social media content/summary to be posted along with the link. I normally draft this myself. Now, I want my deep learning model to do it. Or at the max generate it based on some rules.
• Generating the poster as an image by using the news content.

Thinking along these lines I came up with a few ways this can be done. Given a prompt (the title or some keyword), the model should generate some content related to it, or given a news article, the model can create a summary out of it. Then we can have some algorithm that will make the poster image.

With this understanding, I made a simple Trello board for better project management. Trello is pretty good for this purpose. However, if you are familiar with other tools, you can use them.

As for Trello, it is super simple to use and self-explanatory. I have made five columns for my reference-

• Future ideas- Here I will be updating all the ideas that I have but will not be implementing right now. I left this blank at the time of writing this article.
• Features- These are the main feature ideas I am currently prioritizing on.
• In progress- This column will include the features I am actively working on.
• Testing- Once the feature is ready, I plan to do multiple rounds of testing to ensure that it is ready to be deployed.
• Done- The final column to push the tasks to, once they are done.

You can have a similar structure for your project. Here are the features I have defined at the moment.

Feature 1- Generate artistic images

The objective is to create a module that takes in an input image and returns an artistic version of that image. This particular feature will be used when I am required to post creative content. I have added four tasks as a part of this-

• Identify different methods to generate images
• Select two feasible methods from the list
• Implement method 1 as a stand-alone module [Placeholder]
• Implement method 2 as a stand-alone module [Placeholder]

Feature 2- Generate news posters

The objective here is to create a module that can automatically generate a poster of the latest news in the required topics. Here are the subtasks as a part of it-

• Create a program to fetch the latest news in the required topics.
• Identify different ways to create poster images using computer programs.
• Pick the relevant technique and implement the same to generate the posters given the input news content.
• Make a template design poster with different customizable elements.

Feature 3- Generate social media text

The objective is to generate a short social media text/summary based on a given prompt. This will be used along with the news posters while sharing them on social media. I have added the following tasks for this-

• Tweet generator
• LinkedIn/FB content generator
• Dynamic hashtags generator based on the social media platform.

Feature 4- Twitter Engine

The idea here is to build a custom module to manage your Twitter account. This module must be capable of performing various social media actions. For now, I am only focusing on creating a function to post tweets.

You can view my Trello board here- https://trello.com/b/ERf63SXg/sltp-2020-project

Also, notice that when you make everything super modular like this, each module is like a product of its own that can be used in a completely different context. I will explore more on this angle in future articles.

Now our tasks are very well filtered and properly defined. Completing them will give us the first version of the product I want to build. If you are unable to come with features and tasks for your own project like this, feel free to ask me for help. If you notice, so far I haven’t done any programming. Understanding your requirements is the most important step in the process of building something. Hence, do spend enough time on this.

So, why should you bother about creating a structured plan like this on some project management tool before you actually start building your project?

• To establish a perfect clarity in your thoughts.
• To have well-defined steps to follow and not get lost in between.
• If you have collaborators, it will be easy to track the progress of work.
• This is surely a great way to document your journey and the evolution of your idea.

With that being said, I would recommend everyone working on a project to make something like this. This can also help you not abandon the project in between.

Moving forward, I will be writing dev blogs for each of the above features as I build them. Stay tuned for the same.

For more details about SLTP 2020, visit-

Self Learning Technology Program 2020

I have also created a peer to peer learning group on WhatsApp (Can be migrated to Telegram if more people are interested) to support your self-learning journey and the exchange of ideas and experiences with the community. This is an invite-only community. If you wish to be added to the same, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn.

Previous articles in this series:

Creating A Project Idea That Is Right For You

Creating a basic project roadmap

Disclaimer- While I try to present the best (or the most convenient way) of what I know at the moment in building products, I want you to be aware that there can be other better ways to do something that I describe here. Always stay vigilant and keeping exploring. With that being said, if you have any suggestions, do let me know.