Getting Started: Stripe Atlas, AWS Amplify

Ok, starting this #buildinginpublic thing today!!! Excited and nervous? Mostly nervous that I'll lose steam and won't finish what I start. Which I tend to do. But I recently launched my ceramics store (just on Shopify), which I had been planning to do for almost a year. It's a project that actively loses money lol but it's been so rewarding to work on it! I'm realizing I want more projects in my life that teach me things and are super rewarding even if they "don't go anywhere." I'm understanding that these are really energizing for me. I also work on a podcast (Three Unicorns if you're interested) and that has been a wonderful, enlightening experience as well.

I would love to eventually have a software side project that turns into something that sustains me. I understand that's really hard and takes a lot of patience and time. I'm not committed to a particular outcome, but I feel motivated to at least try and see what I learn.

I've been ruminating on LOTS of ideas. My "startup ideas" note in my notes app is long af. After some thought I've picked a SaaS idea to get started with. I'm not sure it's the best one, but whatever. It's simple and will hopefully be pretty straightforward to build so I can get an MVP up and running quickly. I'll write something else on what the actual idea is because I do want some feedback. However, before I even get started on building the actual idea, I want a personal framework that allows me to get a new project set up really quickly with the basic boilerplate and infra. I feel like that way, if I pivot to a new idea, it'll be easy to get started. Part of why I haven't started yet is because I'm trying to figure out what I want my stack to be and learn how to set everything up.

I incorporated a little LLC using Stripe Atlas, and I work at Stripe :) so I definitely want my payments infra to be Stripe. Also when you sign up with Stripe Atlas, you get some free Amazon AWS credits. So because of that I've chosen to go with Amazon as my cloud hosting service. To get up and running quickly I'm going to use AWS Amplify. I think my stack will be something like React, GraphQL, Python, DynamoDB, Redis. I'm choosing React and Python because I already know those things and they'll make it easier to get something built quickly. I'm using this guide to get spun up.

Let's get it goin!