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2024–2025

Offer generator

Offer generator

Overview (V3)

Offer generator is a web app we build in our startup that me and my friends have founded. It is aimed for small businesses to have their product info up to date, and speed up their offer generation process for their customers. The app offers an intuitive UI for generating a PDF file with the product info to be sent to their customers.

The main time-saving feature for our client is our over 100 000 product catalogue from different suppliers has been integrated within the software in an easily filterable UI and fully accessible even if a supplier’s website crashes (which happens quite frequently).

This was built within our startup Pion Blanc Oy. We are a small team of 3 software developers. More info in our website www.pionblanc.fi. This has been my biggest personal project yet that I have built from scratch, and what a journey it has been! This project has seen lots of iterations, and I’ve learned a lot about software development.

Key Features

Tech stack

What I learned

Older version

2024

Overview (V2)

At this stage the app was still work-in-progress, but we made huge improvements compared to the previous version. For example we actually started using React and for good reason. I tried using Redux for state management, but I felt it was way too complicated for A) an inexperienced front-end dev and B) for our use case.

MSSQL server was something that I’ve only heard shade being thrown towards, and my experience with it kind of confirmed it. The biggest issues were 1) installing ODBC drivers, 2) not being open-source software and 3) being more designed for Windows environments.

The whole tech stack was just kind of weird. We used Flask for the API, which was deployed on a Hetzner VPS, our React app was deployed on Vercel and the MSSQL database ran on my home laptop.

Tech stack

What I learned

Overview (V1)

Looking back I can see how far we’ve gotten in such a short time. This version was done as a desktop application as our first MVP.

Deployment was something we haven’t considered initially. I think this is one of the inexperienced dev’s classic blunder even though it is inevitable eventually. Surprise, surprise, when it was time for deployment, it was a huge pain, since our first user used MacOS and installing Python and the appropriate dependencies was next to impossible. I wish there was a tool where an app and its dependencies would work on any machine!

As our database we used simple .csv files as in the beginning, but we quickly pivoted to an SQL database. I already had MSSQL Server on my laptop, and we actually deployed it from my home laptop.

Building a UI for a Python desktop app sucks. It was a lesson I had too learn the hard way. I quickly realized that this cannot be the modern way of creating front-end applications.

Tech stack

What I learned