The AppMecca tutorial¶
You will build Tally — a public product roadmap and feedback board. Visitors see what is Planned, In progress and Shipped, submit ideas and vote on them; you get a weekly digest.
It starts as a static React page. It ends as a React frontend, a Python API, a background worker, Postgres, Redis, a drive and a bucket — one app, one URL, one config file.
The object is not to teach you to code. Every line of Tally is written for you. The object is to make AppMecca familiar, so that the next thing you deploy is your own.
The three tracks¶
| Track | Steps | Time | You finish able to |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beginner | 1–5 | ~1½ h | Get something live, and see what the platform is doing — read a queue row, find the right log, recognise a config key that was silently ignored |
| Intermediate | 6–11 | ~2¾ h | Run a real application: a container, a database, environment variables, a worker, scheduled work, email, and somewhere to put files |
| Advanced | 12–17 | ~2¾ h | Operate it: branches, backups, rollback, splitting the frontend out, edge caching, teams, and taking it all down |
Most people should stop at the end of Intermediate. That is the whole application; everything after it is about running one.
The times are estimates until someone has walked it
They are the author's, not a measurement. They will be replaced with real numbers from a timed run on a clean machine.
How it is built¶
Every step has a branch in the tutorial app repository, holding the finished state of that step. You can start at step 1 and work through, or jump to any step and start there.
Three steps break on purpose — 3, 6 and 14. They are the most useful steps in the tutorial. This platform runs your old version until a new one is proven healthy, which means a failed deploy is not an outage and a deliberate failure costs you nothing but teaches you where to look. Step 14's failure is the interesting one: it succeeds and is broken anyway.
Before you start¶
Go to Step 0. It takes about twenty minutes and installs one thing.
Then do Step 0.5, which deploys the finished app, lets you look at it, and deletes it again. Ten minutes, and you will know the whole tutorial works on your machine and your account before you invest an afternoon in it.