This is the first weekly update for our project "Be The Forest". If you don't already know what our plans are, you can read about them in our kickoff post here: Be The Forest Kickoff

😬 1 week down, 3 to go

Here we are the first sprint week of our current project Be The Forest: The API that plants trees, is complete and we are ready to begin our next 1-week sprint.

How did week one go?

Very well actually, we have got loads done, and if anything we are probably a little bit ahead of schedule!

🎉 Week one achievements

We are really happy with what we have achieved in the first week and it has placed us in good stead for the next.

Came up with a name, bought a domain, and designed a logo

One of the first things we did this week was come up for a name for the project. This was by far the hardest thing we did! Why is choosing a name for something so hard?

I think the pressure of only having a week didn't help either, we were constantly aware that we were spending too much of our short amount of time going back and forth trying to get the perfect name.

In the end, we settled with "Be the Forest". It's quite literal, but we like it as in some ways our API is going to empower people to plant their forests.

After coming up with a name we started looking at designing a quick logo. This was a much quicker process. Tree's provide a nice visual starting point for logo design.

Launched a holding page

After getting our domain, we launched a quick holding page providing the most basic info about the project and somewhere for people to signup for more info. We have had a few signups too!

👉 [https://betheforest.org/](Be the Forest: The API that plants trees)

Part of our master plan to build 7 projects in 28 weeks was to make repetitive tasks such as setting up holding pages for projects as quick as possible. We achieved this and the holding page was live in no time. This was all thanks to the tools we used:

• Gridsome
• Tailwind UI
• Mailjet
• Netlify

Designs for marketing site

The holding site is just temporary and before we launch we need a fully-fledged marketing site that explains why you might want to use Be the Forest and how it works. We had intended to do designs for this next sprint but managed to get an initial version done already.

On top of that, we have already started developing it so hopefully, we can get the marketing site out soon.

Designs for the dashboard

We also started very early designs for the user dashboard where users will be able to manage billing and retrieve their API keys. These are wireframes more than anything. Will will be using Tailwind UI to speed to this up so there is not that much design to do.

Planning

On top of all of the above, we have done lots of planning. We use Clubhouse as our project management tool, and have set up the majority of our tasks, and divided them between 4 week-long sprints. This is going to help us stay on track and keep the project progressing.

👉 What's next?

With one sprint down and 3 sprints left, its time to get making. The first sprint has been about getting set up and creating a direction for the project, the following sprints are going to be where the real hard work begins and we start to make the project a reality.

The top-level goals for this sprint are as follows:

• Setup to the projects and repositories for the 3 remaining elements that need to be developed, API, User dashboard, and user documentation
• Finish and deploy v1 of the marketing site
• Start the initial groundwork on the API

We are excited to get cracking this sprint, it's going to be nice to start getting our hands dirty in some code. We will be back the same time next week with another progress update. Thanks for reading!