When starting my carreer as a freelance webdeveloping specialist. That's when I knew I need to have a handy billing tool to write estimates and invoices and have them saved all in one place. After evaluating several billing or invoicing tools i had a clear goal. My high quality demand to have as small a file size as possible as a printed PDF in my own design would cause me to create it myself.
After finishing my React tutorial of 36 hours video courses plus coding challenges and with my experience with creating PDF's I was set up for this little project of my own. By investing 111,5 hours of work on the React App, connecting Firebase and fiddling out the data-connection to print the resulting PDF's. Integrated testing with Jest in connection with Enzyme. First it felt like building the app around the printing process. But in the End printing the PDF is just a component and the end of a User story. This project is a lot about user interaction with forms and different kind of inputs. I did finish the version 1.0.0 in end of October 2018.
Having this very own custom piece of software let's me personally bend the tool to fit what I really need for my daily paperwork. This is what software shall do. Helping me out. Other than that i had a good learning curve on how this technology stack apps are working.