How I PoC?

In other words, how do I work?

From the perspective of the success of the project, I think it is essential that everyone involved talks about the same thing. In other words, they work towards the same vision.

Architecture as a picture

To get a common vision, I usually start by making a preliminary architecture picture, which outlines both the existing and the goal. There are various tools for doing these. At the moment, my favorite is draw.io, which seems to be also compatible with Atlassian Confluence. To test many things related to Confluence and Jira, I also have my own Confluence/Jira account, where I can, for example, test the implementation of Gantt charts with Atlassian extensions, etc.

draw.io does not require the Atlassian ecosystem to work, so it can also be used alongside other project management tools.

I participate in the actual project management mainly in terms of creating epics and tickets and prioritizing them. In other words, I have worked mainly as a technical project manager, helping the actual project manager break down and organize work.

Frontend

I am not a real UX/UI designer, although I am very interested in this. For this, I have my own Figma account, where I can model different user interfaces and if necessary, this can also be used as a starting point for designing other user interfaces.

The next stage of the design is to write it into an application. I chose Figma because it is widely used and has various extensions that can be used to generate code for developers from the plan. Personally, I have been interested in Flutter recently, but other technologies are also interesting (e.g. react, vue, angular, bootstrap, etc.)

For code level testing and verification on the frontend side, I use JetBrains tools (e.g. WebStromg)

Despite the fact that there are good tools for doing UI design and producing/enriching it with code, it seems that "hand-porting the design into code" cannot be completely avoided.

Backend

In backend design, my starting point is primarily to try to model the concepts used in business and their relations into a data model and preferably directly into a database, from which I create database diagrams to get a common picture. Here I can perhaps also use draw.io to help create a common picture.

In database design and use, I mainly use JetBrains' DataGrip application. Another good option is DBeaver, which I have also used a lot. Both tools allow you to connect to many different SQL and NoSQL databases (e.g. Postgres, Oracle, etc.)

For programmatic processing of database data, I use JetBrains products (IntelliJ, PyCharm, CLion, etc.)

I use these tools mainly because their features make it significantly easier to carry out PoC experiments, for example through documentation and auto-completion. Another good tool is Copilot, which often provides good code examples to work on.

Cloud / On-premises

This is such a broad area that it is difficult to give more detailed working methods here. Generally speaking, PoC testing here is done when the first version of the architecture plan is ready for PoC testing.

For testing, I have my own AWS and Azure accounts, where I can safely do various tests lightly with my own admin credentials and without potentially breaking the rest of the ecosystem. So in these environments I can easily do PoC testing of different parts of different solutions.