Lotus

After 6 months in the making, it's a huge relief to cross the finish line. It's only the first finish line and there will be more of those, but it's certainly the toughest one for me.

Half a year ago I took time off work and rented a cabin in the mountains for 4 days to come up with an idea and create something. Anything, really. When I was driving there, I still had no clue what it would be.

I picked two ideas from my to-do list: Sidekiq-like queue for Node.js and GitHub notifications client for reducing maintainer burnout. I seriously struggled to decide which one to build, so I turned to Twitter and just asked people what sounded more interesting. Few hours later it was clear that GitHub notifications were sparking way more attention than a queue system.

And that's how Lotus was started!

One of the things I don't like about myself is poor discipline towards doing things consistently. Whether it's exercising, being on a diet or finishing projects, I have a problem with that. Which is why I was quite scared to publicly commit to building Lotus in the open and write a weekly newsletter about it.

Now I'm convinced this was one of the best decisions I made early on.

Building in the open was the main source of energy for me to keep going. Readers helped me stay on track and release this app to the world. Knowing that someone out there was waiting for that Sunday newsletter was pushing me to stop procrastinating and get to work.

But the best thing is, I met many people in the process who are also creating apps, planning to in the future or were just following along!

Starting on day zero, I shared as much as I could, from deep technical dives like "Making Electron apps feel native on Mac" and "Setting up distribution and automatic updates" to moody issues like "Marketing was an afterthought for me". I'm happy that not only it was interesting and useful to some readers, but this newsletter will also serve as a history book of Lotus. I know I'll be reading these early posts again with a smile on my face years down the road.

Fast forward to today, here we are! I couldn't be happier about this milestone and I'm excited more than ever to keep going!

Now that the wait is over, it's the perfect time to check out Lotus → getlotus.app!