RocketLog

I have a really hard time promoting my own products without feeling too "salesy" or annoying. So far I've just mentioned it on Twitter whenever I notice a friend express a problem that I feel like RocketLog can solve. Thanks to a few retweets and likes, I got my first paid monthly subscription and bunch of new trial users outside of those I've directly shared it with.

It feels really good to have someone else see the value it provides because I've only built it for my own wants and needs so far.

Of course with new people using RocketLog it has also exposed a few bugs. I've been able to reply and resolve them all within the same day, and one of the affected users purchased a full year subscription straight away as a result!

I had been wanting to play with Laravel Jetstream, a starter kit on top of my favourite framework. Jetstream offers two variants - Laravel Livewire, and Inertia.js. I wanted to try both, but Livewire had been getting the most hype after Laracon, so I decided to use it.

I spent my spare time working on it and before long I had a working prototype that I could start using.

I loved Laravel Livewire, but I was having trouble getting some of the UI interactions to work the way I wanted. It was "good enough", but I also needed to work out how to actually charge people for the hosted version, so I decided to wait for Laravel Spark to be released. In the meantime I just kept using the app for myself and tweaking it in my spare time.

When Laravel Spark was released, I was re-inspired to start working on the project again. I didn't feel comfortable charging people money for it in it's current state though, so I decided to switch to the Inertia.js version of Laravel Jetstream so that I could use Vue.js, where I am much more comfortable creating user interfaces.

The rebuild wasn't that bad. I started a new project, and then pulled in all the models and migrations, and then ported over all of the Blade templates to Vue. I fell in love with Inertia.js.

I got a bit carried away and added dark mode, because Tailwind 2.0 had come out with a really nice way of implementing it.

The product now feels super polished and I really enjoy using it every day. If no one else uses it, I won't be too bothered as I have got so much out of it myself.

I realise it's basically just a minimalist web-based todo list with some opinionated rules and behavior, so it wont excite too many people. But I think there is market that will really appreciate what is does and doesn't do.

I had been using a paper bullet journal and was appreciating many of the aspects of a physical journal that digital todo lists always seemed to overlook.

I set out to make myself a digital bullet journal so that I didn't need to carry my journal with me everywhere anymore.