Our first technical meeting for the project was this afternoon, with the primary goal of clarifying details and expectations in very broad scopes. For the next few weeks I'll be doing a high level system design that I can break into individual subprojects and their dependencies.
A new approach that I'm taking is to completely eschew GUI development in this first stage, instead writing console mini-applications that print out what the GUI would look like given the inputs and shared state. It could be help our development team (just two of us) converge more rapidly on an understanding of the data modeling with singular focus. Each mini-app is kind of like a wireframe page, the textual representation of a webcomponent. I think it could save us a lot of headache later, as well as provide a way to do automated testing of our tech infrastructure. These mini apps are small and focused, and could work as "documentated examples as code".
I'm wondering now how to persist state across multiple command line applications. Shove it into special environment variables in the shell? Create a lightweight dictionary module that can read/write state to a file? Questions for another day.