DashCaster

Today is the day I launch. The app has been done for more than 8 months and I've spent time "trying to figure out how to launch".

My friend and accountability partner finally had enough of my procrastination, so she yelled at me (gently and benevolently, of course) to post here or anywhere, but to just do something.

I still ran through the dozen what-ifs that had been holding me back, but I finally had to agree that launching and getting feedback was the only way to get those what-ifs answered, so here we are.

Near the end of April, DashCaster was complete, functional, and deployed to AWS.

I had been so excited about getting my ideas implemented and then I saw them on the screen and kind of panicked. I ran through all of the "what-ifs" that face people doing something in public and I had the standard reaction of doing nothing.

The timeline up to this point has been written in past-tense because it took until now to even be willing to tell the story of development. Every day I would get the Indie Hackers emails and see what other people were doing and wonder how they were able to stand up and tell others.

So I lurked and worked on other things - that felt safe.

About a week after the UI became real, the first backend commits were made to GitHub. At this point, there was a "full" system that only did a few things, but it was great to see everything working as a whole.

This started the long development cycle of idea-implementation-iteration that lasted about 6 months on a very part-time basis.

I knew that DashCaster needed to look cool and that is not my skillset, so I hired a frontend developer with design skills and we started building.

The first version of the dashboard was allowed to be hardcoded, but I wanted it to look good and have fun transitions when the data changed. The first commit came a few days after I hired him and we started iterating.

I'm a developer and do a lot of contract work as my day job.

People kept asking about when the next build was going to go to test or production and what versions had been deployed. I wanted the kind of display you see in the network operations center of a movie that had all the various pieces of data displayed in real-time.

It turns out that there are a lot of solutions for that, but they all seemed too expensive and complicated to me. They also focused a lot on integration and I wanted something where I could easily just edit the value and have it broadcast out.

I sketched the initial idea in a sketchbook and a few hours later bought the dashcaster.com domain name as a combination of dashboard and broadcaster.