CanITeachMyselfKiteboarding.com

I have worked on various side projects for years and never finished any of them. With two young children I don't seem to have the time to invest in building something complicated. So I decided for this project I would make it as simple as possible. In reality it could have been simpler but I wanted to take the opportunity to learn some new tech on the way.

Overall it has taken about 3 months working a couple of hours a week (more over the last few weeks to get it finished this year).

I built the site with Gatsby as a good excuse to learn React. I opted not to use any CSS frameworks to force myself to practice creating responsive UI. This added time and probably lead to a worse end result but it was good for my personal development. The site uses Firebase for the database, cloud functions, auth and analytics. This is the first time I have built a serverless application myself. The build process is pretty cool; when I commit the code it triggers a build and deploy using Google Cloud Build. That was pretty straightforward but I also needed a way to rebuild the site when a user updates their school details. On every other project I have worked on I would just get the data dynamically on page load but I wanted to improve performance and SEO for this one so the pages are pre-rendered. This complicates things and requires a rebuild every time the data changes. I use cloud functions to achieve this. I also debounce the build triggers so I don't blow through my Google Cloud Platform quota if lots of people edit their details on the same day. It means there is a delay between making changes and them being visible on the website but I can play around with that when I have a better idea how much this is going to cost to run.

At the moment there is no means for me to make money. My target right now is to get real people using the site and have a couple of kite schools create an account and edit their details. Eventually I will allow people to promote their schools which will make them stand out more and give me an opportunity to monetise the site.

A lot of people travel to learn kite boarding as it is very location dependent. It can be difficult to find lessons in different countries and there wasn't a global comprehensive directory of kite schools.

On top of that, many people initially try to learn it themselves which almost always ends in disaster. People get hurt, spend too much money on the wrong equipment, wreck that equipment and generally don't progress. Eventually, bruised and frustrated, they sell their gear at a big loss.

But it doesn't have to be like that. I had an idea to target people who were right at the beginning of their journey into the sport and steer them towards lessons instead of going the self taught route.