12 projects in 12 months - week 1 - a retrospective

Wow, this week went fast! It feels like the days went faster than normal. Already seven days have passed from the first month of the twelve months I will spend working on twelve projects. How did this first week go? Keep reading and find out.

I started the week with some preparations;

• I dusted off my Twitter account, adding a new banner and adding some tweets.
• I installed some software updates and the latest versions of Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.
• I cleared out all files that were in the root of my website, which were leftovers from previous attempts in building my own website

After that I began to work out the plan for my website, adding a bunch of to-do items to Trello which I will be using for now as I'm already familiar with Trello. I created the GitHub repository and started with a fresh new .NET 6 Web Application. The next following days I spent time on setting up the project infrastructure, defining my entities and setting up the database.

On day 5 I removed everything and started over. I was already making it more complex for myself than needed in this stage, so I had to keep it more simple. Don’t spend too much time on structure, spend time on delivering, especially for a product like my own website. It won’t get any other users than me, it won’t be all that complex, so the infrastructure doesn’t have to be industry standard. Whatever I could do the quickest would work for me. I made way more progress on day 5 than in the four days prior.

I started on the design of the homepage and I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. I’m not a designer at all, so I just try stuff using Bootstrap and see where it leads me. Looking for inspiration at other websites and trying to do something similar.

Online Presence

Apart from all the technical stuff I did, I spent some serious time throughout the week tweeting, responding to comments on IndieHackers and Medium and tried to socially interact. It turns out that it took more time than I would have imagined, but it's fun and helpful to do. Building connections is a great way to stay motivated and it makes me feel accountable for the things I'm doing.

I gained 56 followers on Twitter, got loads of views, comments, upvotes and 25 followers here on IndieHackers and a bunch of views and claps on my Medium post.

These statistics really push me forward and I greatly appreciate everyone who took the time to read, respond to and/or shared my content.

Read my full post here on Medium: https://medium.com/@terryverduijn/my-first-week-trying-to-complete-12-projects-in-12-months-88fc09704114