The Djinn
Extract data from websites into beautiful charts
Even though I did not meet the original deadline I must say I was actually pretty close. Then the New Year kicked in and delayed things further.
But nevertheless, the fact remains - The Djinn is live! And I'm more grateful than ever to my 2019-self that I took up this challenge. In spite of missing the deadline I definitely feel that setting it was a good idea. It allowed me to focus on things that matter and look at the product from a different perspective.
Now I can finally start gathering feedback and improve upon it.
Towards Christmas I spotted a really nice initiative on IndieHackers, where people were trying to ship their products before Christmas.
I was quite busy with the preparations but the idea resonated with me so much that once I had a little spare time I decided to create a similar challenge - to release a neglected side project before the end of the year.
With most of the backend code ready I had to focus on creating a proper UI!
I'm not primarily a web designer and so I subconsciously looked for ways to delay working on the UI side, which was needed to get other people to use it.
I found a super-exciting tech challenge on the backend - creating a hyper-precise sub-second and highly available scheduler that would dispatch the scraping jobs.
Days turned into weeks. Weeks into months. And finally in May I switched jobs and the whole project was pushed to the side...
Black Friday was closing in and I had a small shopping list which I was hoping to clear.
I needed a simple tool to observe prices of the things I wanted to buy and decided to quickly hack up a web service that would extract the prices every couple minutes.
I guessed that I can't be the only person that might need such a service and decided to create a product out of it.
2 Comments
Congrats! Nice landing page. I'm trying to do a test for indie hackers to get the top post of the day. how would I do that with the css?
Not sure what you mean, but I used a template and only tweaked it slightly 😉