Recent travel to Rwanda has brought me to build a POC (Proof-of-Concept) with a familiar stack, only in a very different structure.
To better understand why the POC was built that way, I should give you the backstory.
The Backstory
In 2016, I was invited to present about Drupal & Elm in DrupalCamp Tokyo. I always like to bring this fact up in any kind of conversation - but this time there’s even a reason beyond my usual bragging rights: The flight is terribly long from Israel to Tokyo. Twenty-four hours door-to-door kind of long.
As it so happened, a short time before my flight, Adam, Gizra US Director had virtually dropped a PDF on my table. I was preparing myself for yet another long RFP (Request for proposal) with an impossible spec, and an even less possible timeline. I was surprised to see that was not the case. That PDF was forty-something pages, with a wireframe per page and some notes, showing the flow of a rather interesting app.
Three years later I still refer to those pages as the best spec we’ve ever received. The people behind those wireframes were Dr. Wendy Leonard and herIhangane team. They were planning an electronic medical record for an HIV prevention program in Rwanda.
I was really impressed. Sure, the wireframes were rougher than usual, but they did exactly what they were supposed to. The team was smart enough to not rush into development and in fact, they even printed out the spec pages, went to the field, sat with nurses, and let them click on the screens. The printed screens. They clicked on paper!
Anyway, did I ever mention I was invited to Tokyo in 2016?
That long 24 hours flight. I’ve finished my book (“Ancillary Justice”), watched a movie (“Wreck-It Ralph”, as for some reason I love watching cartoons on planes), and there were still many hours before my arrival. So I took my laptop out, spun up a Drupal backend and an Elm frontend - and the first POC for Ihangane’s app called “E-Heza” was born in the sky.