Road to Actually Launching #1: Let's Get it Together!

I really love the idea of #BuildInPublic.

I didn't really know it was a thing for a while, I just kinda did it naturally. It was a way of supposedly holding me accountable, marketing the product and talking to fellow nerds about nerd stuff. So, I made a YouTube channel and a couple of blogs over the years and built up a good Twitter following. Then I got on IndieHackers and started talking about my build here as well!

Then... nothing happened.

You may have seen my post on falling off the train. That's essentially what happened: I had some awesome ideas, spent several months banging out some great code, and it just essentially dissipated.

Life happened.
COVID happened.
Kids happened.
9-5 happened.

Lots of things happened, and that's not to say they're good excuses, but they are reasons and I think it's fine to enumerate those.

So, what now?

Well, now we get back on the train. I'm not going to treat this as the product launch or announcement blog post, because I'm well away from that, but this is going to serve as my way of building in public: I'm going to post here, on Twitter and on my blog at least 5 times a week specifically about the product I'm building out. They might be technical blogs, a wrap-up of features and bugs killed or a general description of what I got done that week.

So, let's get into the first post!

What needs to be done?

There's a lot of difficult inertia to overcome with the first steps. First, I have to build out an API that allows for file upload and figure out at least an initial data model to store the files and index information about them. I'm planning on at least roughly sticking with the MERN stack for this project but I'm going to be building a good bit of backend stuff with Python as well.

I've gotta actually set up a good CI/CD environment and set up a staging environment to get things running and test them out. I'm a good bit away from having something public (though I have the domain at least) so the staging environment is going to be my home for a while.

I've decided against learning AWS for this project specifically. I'm going to be learning it in the background for a while, but I didn't want to stall the project for an unknown period of time while I learn it. So, back to my best friend DigitalOcean.

I'll be using GitHub Actions for CI/CD. I've used it a little in the past and found it super intuitive, though there's still a lot I have to learn.

Finally, the local tech stack: VS Code running on an Ubuntu VM. I've found that there's way less friction in developing on a Linux machine for me, especially for Node applications, so I don't want to do much of it on my Windows host.

For now, that's it! Follow me on here, add my blog to your RSS reader of choice or follow me on Twitter to watch the journey. And dammit, get on to me if you haven't seen an update in a while!