Accessibility data collection, I am running a local application with a mongoDB connection so that when I decide to deploy it fully after validation then I can without having to collect the data again.
Honestly data structures don't have to be perfect unless you are feeding it into another service that you don't control. If you end up wrapping the research into another piece of the puzzle you control both sides anyways.
The "what's the penalty for being wrong" question is the part I'd keep. That one works at any scale.
But I spent five years on a solo app and never wrote anything close to this. Not on principle event, just the design just kept moving. The decisions that ended up mattering weren't ones I could have named on day one, they were things I cut in year three once I actually understood what the app was for.
If I'd written the objective sentence up front I'd have locked in a version that turned out wrong. The clarity came from building the thing, not from describing it first.
For coordinating people or catching a security flaw before it ships, sure, all of this makes sense. Solo just runs on different rules I guess.
The vanilla-JS-is-enough-now lesson is the same one I keep relearning on the Apple side, every few years the platform absorbs what we used to reach for a library to do, and the dependency you added "to save time" becomes the thing you're maintaining. This site aged well because it bet on the platform catching up, and it did.
Juice Box Monkey Designs — the dev shop with the monkey. Currently shipping Just Drop, a clipboard with a memory.
https://www.juiceboxmonkeydesigns.com