A story of success and guilt
Developers, I'd like to share a success story of using open-source technology to build a product.
I started archbee.io as a pet project, wanting to learn this obscure thing named SVG. I was mostly a Java backend developer at the time and thought I should step out of my comfort zone and learn to build something cool with it.
Built this thing which was a software architecture diagramming solution. Well... solution was too much to say, it was almost laughable when I launched. But somehow, a small number of people loved it and kept using it. Very small amount of traffic came everyday from me answering some Quora questions, but just enough traffic to keep me going mentally.
The pet project was a really quick vanilla Javascript and Jointjs (a diagramming framework) on the frontend and bare Node.js and MongoDB. All running on a very cheap $10/m Scaleway machine somewhere in Germany :)
After I determined I could make a product people would pay for (knowledge base for dev teams), I started changing my tech options so I could peacefully work on this 10 years and even have other people contributing to this code base.
So I did it. Went with strict mode TypeScript for everything and rewrote the front-end in React and Next.js. Then I was kinda meh about MongoDB and spent another day changing it to Sequelize + PostgreSQL. I couldn’t find a good enough UI for PostgreSQL and I said let’s use MySQL & Workbench in dev and when I deploy I’ll just change the Sequelize driver back to PostgreSQL. As you can probably tell, this didn’t work so I got stuck with MySQL - that’s how I picked it :), but I’m happy it turned out this way, I like it very much. Then I realized I needed to make this whole thing realtime to offer superior user experience and I needed a Redis for PubSub and socket.io.
I realize I’m riding on open-source and sometimes I feel guilty for contributing almost nothing back. I’ve always said I love open-source but my words didn’t match my actions, and they still don’t.
Does anybody else feel this way?
Check out the latest incarnation of the product I am talking about on ProductHunt! I'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback!
Congrats on the success, and neat product! And yes, I've also felt that way for years. That's a big motivation I had in creating https://www.boss.dev, and there are now lots of good ways to support OSS: tidelift, patreon, github sponsors, etc. I recommend you pick what's best for you and give back to the community or projects you care about most.
Thank you for the compliment!
boss.dev looks interesting. saw the page, will def fully check it out later in the week :)
donating to those open source project is also an option to give back if you can't do it by code contribution.
And congrats on your product.
will def do it in the future. I like initiatives like OpenCollective :)
Nice product. How long did it take from the start , changing stack to launching?
Hi @emekaonu. Thank you for your appreciation!
It's very complicated to know how much, because I've been on and off doing dev consultancy and building this product. I know I've measured at least 1900 hours on it since I've started in February 2018.
Let me know if you found the product useful, and what more would you like it to do :)
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Hey @balban. Thank you!
Not exactly from scratch, I used Slate.js which is pretty low level, but really awesome.
I agree regarding the polishing, I've tinkered a lot with it and still doing it every day. It seems never ending tbh :))
Yep, it's way easier just to have a service host it for you. We are providing hosting with SSL certs for free :)
What are you working on?
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Buzz looks awesome, loved some of your blog posts, just skimmed through.
Let me know on DM or Twitter DM if you had something in mind on the collaboration side.
Hi. I am also looking to build collaboration on prosemirror. Happy to chat :)