| Nice that you have a connection to get your foot in the door at your Dad's plant. Customer #1. The path I would recommend to learn full stack development. Go through the books Head First HTML and CSS (get an inexpensive hosting account you can FTP files to and setup some domains, point to your hosting), next go through Head First PHP and mySQL. Next is Headfirst Javascript then Headfirst jQuery. After those you should sign up for teamtreehouse.com. You could play around with developing this in PHP without a framework, setting up a login in system you would learn a lot. Sometimes frameworks are tough to understand what all the magic is happening behind the scenes if you haven't creating a simple app with login, etc in vanilla PHP on your own. For your customer version though you will want to use a framework, more secure, better organized code, etc. I would recommend developing this with Laravel(PHP) it has a great community so you'll be able to find great learning resources to get started. (Rails is good too, but I think Laravel will be easier to get started/deploy your app) Also I recommend developing on a mac. Windows always seems to have obscure issues that you will waste hours/days on. laracasts.com will get you started with Laravel. There are great deployment tools forge and envoyer. Hosting on Digital Ocean is perfect for most apps, AWS and linode too) Use stripe for billing. There is a SaaS add-on to the framework call Spark. It's ok but, I find I'd rather roll my own stripe/SaaS integration. Also Spark does use Vue.js though so since you're just learning I would stick with developing the app using jquery for ajax interactions and think about moving up to vue in the future. I would create the MVP as a web application for all the interactions. Then once you have that established you can look at adding true android and iOS apps. Those might be better to hire out the development of. Or a future learning project. You should be able to set everything up as a mobile web application, use the bootstrap framework for the look and feel of your app. There are some ready made admin templates that can get you something similar to baremetrics. Having your Dad's plant as an initial user for your app will be great to refine what they need get their feedback. Good luck. Follow up and let us know how it's going. |