3 Taking an app from concept to code
This chapter covers
- Defining the scope of an application
- Designing the user interface
- Organizing the code for an app
- Streamlit’s workhorse input widgets
In my early days as a software engineer, I was often surprised by how much time I spent on activities other than writing code. I’d spend multiple days, or even weeks, simply understanding the problem I was trying to solve, and even more time on design, all before typing a single line of code.
I felt anxious because I didn’t feel productive. Scribbled meeting notes and design docs didn’t do anything. Over time, I realized those days and weeks weren’t wasted. Deep thinking about what I was trying to do made the end product better. Likewise, this book is not just about teaching Streamlit code. It’s about helping readers develop apps in the real world. Planning and design are inescapable parts of the process.
Though we don’t have weeks to spend on these topics, this chapter gives a taste of the end-to-end experience of developing an app. We’ll start with the app concept and convert it into a set of requirements. Then, we’ll develop a design that meets those requirements, working backward from the user experience, and considering code organization. Finally, we’ll walk through the code and logic, introducing some of Streamlit’s most common widgets along the way. There’s a lot to do, so let’s get started!