As an indie hacker, what're the most challenging engineering tasks you faced/solved?

For SongRender, it was building a music visualizer with no background in digital signal processing and a graphics editor with no background in linear algebra. I read a bunch of papers, watched YouTube videos, and took a Khan Academy course on matrices. I still don’t understand a lot of what I’m doing on a foundational level, but I’ve gotten it to the point where I can mostly get it to do what I want. But it’s still frustrating — new features turn into research projects.

Everything else, I’ve tried very hard to keep as simple and familiar as possible. I chose a stack I knew (React + Express). I’m avoiding GraphQL/Docker/etc by deploying a REST API on plain Linux servers. I’m using PostgreSQL and Redis instead of fancier databases/queues.

This being the first web application I’ve owned from top to bottom, I will say that one of the harder things has been figuring out how to get visibility into all the nooks and crannies of my app. I launched without any sort of uptime monitoring — learned that lesson the hard way. For a while, I was relying on plain logs instead of actual error reporting. Etc etc — there are a million little things on the checklist, and it’s very easy to think you had visibility into one part of your app only to discover it slipped through the cracks.

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For SongRender, it was building a music visualizer with no background in digital signal processing and a graphics editor with no background in linear algebra. I read a bunch of papers, watched YouTube videos, and took a Khan Academy course on matrices. I still don’t understand a lot of what I’m doing on a foundational level, but I’ve gotten it to the point where I can mostly get it to do what I want. But it’s still frustrating — new features turn into research projects.

Everything else, I’ve tried very hard to keep as simple and familiar as possible. I chose a stack I knew (React + Express). I’m avoiding GraphQL/Docker/etc by deploying a REST API on plain Linux servers. I’m using PostgreSQL and Redis instead of fancier databases/queues.

This being the first web application I’ve owned from top to bottom, I will say that one of the harder things has been figuring out how to get visibility into all the nooks and crannies of my app. I launched without any sort of uptime monitoring — learned that lesson the hard way. For a while, I was relying on plain logs instead of actual error reporting. Etc etc — there are a million little things on the checklist, and it’s very easy to think you had visibility into one part of your app only to discover it slipped through the cracks.

jakelazaroff

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6 years ago
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