Build a Mobile App Using DNN as the Backend (DNN Summit 2022)

Feb 09, 2022

SUMMARY

In this session, we'll build a mobile app using DNN as the backend! This session will provide a foundation and open-source building blocks upon which you can use for more robust use cases.

0:00 i'll go ahead and get started here uh welcome to gosh this is the last
0:07 presentation slot of the session except for the round table and i hope everybody
0:12 has gotten a chance to post a few questions in the round table
0:18 and if you haven't please go to the reception area and you'll see a link there where you can fill out
0:25 a simple form there to ask any questions of the dnn leadership panel
0:31 so i'll go ahead and get started here um for those of you uh that may have
0:37 intended to be in a different session well surprise you're now in my session this is a bit about it's it's really a
0:44 sponsor slot if you will but i've catered this uh this particular
0:50 presentation to help not only those that may be interested in us and our services but also
0:56 understanding some of the fundamentals of of our business and how it could us
1:02 honestly apply to any any business out there especially those that are building websites because
1:08 there's so much more to consider than just a website even if you're just a website developer
1:15 and maybe you're in an organization or whatever they can apply some of these principles to that organization
1:22 no matter the age of that organization so for those that don't know me i'm david
1:29 poindexter also known as dn and dave um so
1:34 shameless plug please go out to dnn dave on youtube and please subscribe to that
1:41 channel um i need followers i really do need followers um so i'd appreciate that but now i'm a ceo of envisionative we're
1:48 located in the uh charlotte north carolina greater area
1:54 and i am the strategy lead for the dnn leadership team and on the board of
1:59 directors of dating connect and co-president of southern fried dna and yada yada yada yada you can get
2:06 in contact with me with any of those uh social platforms and github and all that
2:12 below as well as our company um thank you so much for those that
2:18 actually went and subscribed that was so fun it's so thoughtful of you so
2:23 what makes up envisionative um or any real successful business i would
2:29 say we actually start with a real solid foundation
2:35 and i'll i'll go into a little bit deeper dive into each of these a bit and you
2:40 know any good business needs some some good building blocks to build things with you know be that either websites or
2:48 advertising campaigns or whatever it is that your service offers or your business offers or products you got to
2:55 have those pieces to put those things together and make them into a nice cohesive
3:01 offering there teamwork is vital um as many of us know it's
3:06 always better to to have a solid team to work with and bounce ideas off of and
3:13 help each other to improve over over time and really kind of give input and offer
3:19 different perspectives the abundance principle is something that
3:25 is pretty near and dear to my heart and we'll talk a little bit about that and always just having that mentality of
3:32 growth you know no matter what obstacles you may face as a business or
3:37 with clients that you have or projects that are challenging or whatever there's always opportunity for growth and
3:44 refining and owning our craft a bit and then also just continually improving
3:50 our processes there's always room for improvement so let's talk a little bit about the
3:56 solid foundation this is actually an image of one of our clients here this local
4:02 their concrete company and i thought it was fitting to use an image that of one of the buildings
4:09 that they were pouring concrete for and you know a strong foundation in a business is
4:15 absolutely vital because you know things really start falling apart if you don't
4:20 have some core values and and all to really kind of stand on
4:26 you know for us some of those core values are integrity um i live and die by integrity if i you
4:33 know if there's something that's you know off or anything like that or you know just questioning the way that
4:40 we do things or you know our motives behind things it's real important to have that solid
4:47 integrity um in business respect for others is very important
4:52 respect for our teammates respect for our clients and their ideas
4:58 being honest with each other you know um sometimes we need to hear
5:05 the truth you know about how we're feeling you know about a
5:10 certain situation or a certain direction that a project is going and we need to
5:16 be able to have that honest communication throughout a project or
5:21 um anything that we're doing together um it just really helps even you know sometimes it
5:26 not so fun to hear that honest truth you know but a lot of times it's really enlightening
5:32 because you just you know you didn't intend for things to be that way but you know it's good to
5:37 hear from the client that oh we came across a little wrong there so it's a two-way street for us you know and being
5:43 really transparent in the way that we uh do business um sometimes we leverage the
5:49 you know in a dnn space it's a pretty small community in the sense of you know
5:54 providers and service providers and in the area and integrators and all that so
6:00 we we love working with others if we are not the strongest or the best fit for a
6:06 certain thing that we need to do we reach out and we work with somebody in the community or another company in
6:12 the community and just being able to be transparent about that so there's no hidden agendas or anything like that we
6:18 really like that so to that end we really highly value relationships um be it either a client
6:24 relationship or relationships just with each other internally we really value those
6:30 so that's really what makes up our solid foundation talked a little bit about building blocks and you know as you're starting
6:38 out as a business or a new team within an existing business
6:43 you you kind of piecemeal together some blocks that you could possibly build some structures you know and you see a
6:50 nice little um this is kind of like jingle blocks or something like that not really building a jingle tower here but you know
6:58 you could see how fragile that might look and that may just be the way that we start out
7:03 because we're really just learning how these pieces are going to work together to build whatever offering we're going
7:09 to do and later you want to kind of see this evolve
7:15 to a more solid you know model if you will for our building blocks that
7:21 really can be pieced together and they look really nice and clean as well as
7:27 working well together so that it's not so easy for them to be knocked over or
7:32 you know have some vulnerabilities like you see on the on the left-hand side there
7:41 teamwork is vital as well and this one is you know this one's
7:47 easier said than done because you know we're we're people we're human and we have
7:52 emotions and we have egos sometimes and and all that
7:57 but you know really valuing each other goes back to one of those core principles of respect
8:05 um if we're respecting each other you know then you're believing going into a conversation that another team member
8:12 has something valid to offer and that goes with our clients as well
8:18 we like to be a team with our clients so we do a lot of creative marketing and
8:23 you know advertising type things so a lot of times we we end up being a marketing extension
8:29 for clients you know that may not have a marketing team or maybe they just have a single marketing director you know and
8:37 they need a team to bounce ideas off of and bring ideas to the table with so we really
8:43 value teamwork here and you know notice there this one's kind of become cliche-ish but there is
8:48 no eye in team it was funny we we had an internal conversation just today
8:54 of reminding ourselves you know of this how we communicate it's a we thing it's
9:00 not an eye thing right you know and it's just something we have to keep top of mind
9:08 talk a little bit about the abundance principle and i'll spend a little bit of time on this one because it's so key
9:15 in communities like dnn community where it's open source
9:21 and there's a lot of extensions out there that are used that are
9:26 open source and for many years i mean i've actually been
9:32 in the dna community since its inception and i for quite a few years
9:39 i mean i would talk with people and things like that and i would interact on some of the forms and
9:44 have conversations with people but i was a little more of a consumer and it became apparent to me over over those
9:52 early years that this community was a bit different in that
9:57 there are people that were just so willing to help others when there were
10:04 questions and i was one of those people that need a lot of help and you know
10:10 it just kind of became ingrained to me through experience with the dnn community that
10:16 there's this principle you know of you give and you get as a result of that
10:22 giving you don't give to get so um it's just uh something that's kind of
10:28 woven into the fabric of our community and i see it every day and it's just something that is vital to
10:35 us as a business too so we allow ourselves the ability to contribute to
10:43 open source on the clock so to speak you know for for the company we're paying
10:49 people for that time to contribute to open source and it's really great it's a it's a good experience
10:55 i know i've valued that years over in um
11:01 it's not always something that you can directly attribute a return on you know but
11:08 kind of goes back to the principle it's not the reason why you do it to start with
11:14 so if that is kind of core to the way you think then it can really change your mind
11:19 because you you find out i mean it could really change your perception of it because you find out that you do end up getting
11:26 something that's may not maybe like directly attributable to an roi or something but
11:32 it comes back you know good karma whatever you want to call it what comes around goes around
11:37 that kind of thing so we like to help others we need help sometimes and we are so
11:43 appreciative of community members that are able to help us
11:49 so um this one's a good one as well because a lot of times when we
11:56 run into difficult situations where we may not know the answer to a question
12:03 or you know if something is really impacting a client you know in a negative fashion
12:11 and we just don't quite know how to solve it there's always that opportunity to just
12:16 change that challenge from a challenge to an opportunity and
12:21 you know kind of humble ourselves and it goes back to the community is a little bit here as well like a parallel to this
12:28 you know i don't want to be afraid of admitting that i don't know the answer
12:34 we're not super human right so sometimes we don't know the answer we can't find the answer google doesn't tell us or you
12:41 know or we get misled by some post you know somewhere that led us down a path
12:47 that just didn't pan out in the end well i want to be able to just keep
12:54 going you know i want to find the answer for the client if we don't know the answer we're going to try
12:59 to find it we're going to try to reach out to others in the community and see
13:05 if we can really get that answer and sometimes the answer is we just couldn't couldn't
13:10 figure it out but we try to go into a solution space of okay well
13:16 assuming we can't get an answer to this what do we do you know so we just try to shift to that kind of that kind of
13:23 mentality there and always just be growing it's always something to learn
13:28 and kind of along the same lines is you know our internal processes or our processes
13:34 that we have in place to work with our partners or our vendors
13:40 and our clients how we communicate you know those kind of things just always
13:46 being willing to refine and you know admit that yeah i thought that was going to work
13:51 out much better than it did but we need to tweak that a little bit and you know not being so stuck to i
13:58 mean we are a boutique agency if you will we're small enough it's where we're able to be a little
14:04 more nimble with these kind of things and not be so stiff you know with these but you know as we've grown
14:11 we've needed those processes if we have a new hire that comes in or we need to you know educate them on how we do
14:17 something whatever it's nice to have it documented we are by no means perfect in
14:22 this area but we're always willing to tweak and improve and admit when something's not working
14:28 and there's also this aspect of some people operate in different ways
14:34 so what works for one client will not necessarily work for another client we
14:40 we have some clients that they live and you know die by their email or someone that we have other
14:46 clients that you're just not gonna get an email response you're gonna have to pick up the phone and give them a call
14:52 and for us to be adaptable in that way so you know our processes are
14:58 not so stringent that it doesn't you know allow for those flexibilities and communication and
15:05 things like that and use that as a small example but this goes into many different aspects of the business
15:11 so let's kind of bring that we've now got the foundation kind of laid and what the core values and the you know of the
15:16 business are um and some of the different uh pieces to the puzzle for us
15:22 let's kind of bring it a little bit into our world right we've been asked by a client to you build a website
15:29 well those requests come in many different ways different new shapes different
15:34 forms and it it is beyond the technical bits
15:40 right it's not in the end just a bit of code like you see over there on the right and
15:46 you have a website now there are plenty of companies out there that will approach it that way
15:52 um nothing necessarily wrong with it it's just we know there's so much more to the puzzle so we do like to ask the
15:59 questions that are you know sometimes you're constrained by budget or you're constrained by
16:05 other factors or timeline or things like that and you're just not able to go into all these different
16:10 areas that i'm going to touch on here but those things still exist and they still probably apply in some shape form or
16:17 fashion so it's nice to have the conversation a lot of companies will use more of a
16:24 cookie cutter kind of approach and it's not a bad business model in the sense of you know
16:31 generating revenue for a business but is it what the client actually needs in
16:37 the end um we love to build uber
16:44 beautiful sites you know just stellar designs but we rarely ever actually get to do it
16:51 because it's more about what is needed for the website versus what
16:57 could be done or what we enjoy doing so just being willing as a business to recognize the
17:03 actual need know the audience and actually deliver that you know rather than something that we
17:10 just want to do or the only thing that we know how to do you know kind of in the cookie cutter kind of approach
17:18 so one of the things we like to talk about right up front
17:24 is establishing a budget early on sometimes this is known
17:30 by the client sometimes it's willing to be shared sometimes it's not for various reasons
17:36 and that's okay but at the onset of a project we really all need to understand what we're doing
17:43 and what our limitations are are we going to be driven by a budget
17:49 or we can be driven by a timeline do those two line up
17:54 together and sometimes we have to kind of read between the lines you know of what the
18:01 actual ask is and we have to think okay well what
18:06 what is it that the client really needs or is really asking for even
18:12 though they're not directly asking for it and we have to again be honest with
18:17 ourselves in some of these situations and know that sometimes we just
18:23 have to say no because it may not be the ask is not the right
18:29 questions you know coming coming to us in order to be able to deliver what we ultimately know is
18:35 needed um i would love to share some specific examples but for obvious reasons i'm not going to do that but it's like
18:42 it's just something that it's okay as a business to recognize you know that it's a setup
18:50 for disaster or it's you're ultimately not going to be
18:56 um delivering what needs to be delivered um in in in the situation sometimes we
19:03 get this wrong too sometimes we have taken on a project that we really you
19:08 know should have probably not engaged in but we just didn't have the foresight to
19:14 know um you know most of our projects go just nice and smoothly you know yes every project has its bumps along
19:21 the way and we'll learn from those uh mistakes along the way but
19:26 um you know it's it's not a pure science but just being able to read between lines and knowing
19:33 what is really being asked for a project if the budget isn't there to
19:38 get the project to that level in a way that we do it and what we do
19:43 well then it's okay it's okay to say no it's okay for your business to say no as well
19:49 with things like that it you'll be happier in the client in the end will
19:55 hopefully get what they need you know from a different provider that could potentially do what they're asking
20:01 and achieve those goals within that particular budget so really talking about the budget up front is is
20:08 really nice for all parties really so let's talk a little bit about branding because for us
20:15 when it comes to a website i can't tell you how many requests we get of okay i've got this website client

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