Enviari is the evolution of a program I started building several years ago when my wife owned a small business where she was shopping lots of little products out of our house. Over the last few weeks, I’ve started exploring the idea of kicking it off with a fresh start, building it on Azure, with the goal of bringing it to the market in the coming months. This post will detail the core features of the app, as well as touch on the history of it.
Goals
So the main idea of Enviari is to provide a seamless, easy way for small businesses & solopreneurs to be able to ship their product all over the country (potentially the world) at a fraction of the cost of standard postage. It will start by providing USPS as the primary carrier, and synchronize customers in from the Square platform. Users will also be able to save shipping profiles & default preferences to make things a bit easier. I also plan to build in a system by which Dymo label printers will be able to generate physical labors when the shipment is created.
The app will be built on Azure and integrate directly into some of its core features. Here is what I plan to use so far;
- Azure Functions
- Service Bus
- Cosmos DB
- Azure B2C
- Azure Storage/CDN
More services may come, but these are the ones I know for certain I will need to use.
So Why Azure?
I originally targeted AWS when I started the web version of this app last year, but decided to switch focus to using Azure primarily because that’s what I use at work and I can learn cool new things that I can transfer both ways.
App History
The app actually used to be called QuickerShipper, and it started as a basic PowerShell script that I would run manually when my wife need to ship something. That evolved into a Windows-based WPF application that I built out fully and started selling on my website. My wife actually still uses it to this day!
The issue came when I tried to sell out to other people in her little community. Turns out most people wanted to use it on their iPhones and Macs, which is what triggered me to start learning web frameworks & cloud tech so I could make it a universal application using JavaScript.
So when I started live streaming last year, that’s when I started building this thing on my Twitch channel, and at that point it was already the third version of the application.
All of those sessions are actually live on my YouTube channel here.
So Why Mixer?
I’m honestly not tied to any one streaming platform. I chose Twitch because it was (and still is) the market leader. But recently I’ve been interested in switching just to explore the other platforms and see what they have to offer. Someone in my Discord suggested Mixer, so I decided why the hell not.
As of now, I’ll be streaming these sessions every Thursday at 8:30pm Central. Feel free to check it out here: mixer.com/brianmmdev
As always, happy coding! 😁