Less so a startup progress post and more of a personal post. The past 1.5-2 weeks I've been dealing with burn out, where I've barely touched Wheel Train or made any progress.
There's been a lot on my mind, especially with personal things I'm dealing with. My mind hasn't been in the best place, about ~3 months ago something big happened in my life that essentially stole the life that I had built. The girl that I loved, Jessica, disappeared shortly after, I think out of fear. I lost everything, my job, my reputation, my income, the person I was in love with. I became suicidal and on October 1st, 2020 at around 8:30pm I attempted to take my life. It wasn't a success, and I'm still here. I still deal with these thoughts from time to time. I'm hopeful that the challenges that I'm currently facing will be over by March. I want to reach out to Jessica, but I'm currently not advised to given what I'm going through. I wish this was over and I could have some semblance of my old life back.
I'm not sure what the future holds -- I just need to hopefully hold out for a few more months.
The weather's been nice, I've been driving about an hour in the mornings to a park that surprisingly has an outlet and working from there. It's been a real blessing for my mental health, I'm able to get outdoors, get fresh air, watch the lake, get some sun, and walk around the lake when I need a break. I'm surprised at how well it's worked.
I was able to do some work with a new API endpoint for POSTing and DELETEing images to my app, while simultaneously pushing and deleting the image from S3 and integrate it into the React library I'm using for managing image uploads on the client.
Additionally, looked into some logging -- this was a great read on the history of logging in Java and what it means for Clojure: https://lambdaisland.com/blog/2020-06-12-logging-in-clojure-making-sense-of-the-mess
Now unfortunately the check engine light came on during my drive home today, I'll need to find somewhere else to work while the car gets sorted.
It's been about a week since my last post, I'm still dealing with a few personal life issues that are holding me back, but luckily one of my old friends from California has been supporting my mental health and helping me cope with the things I've been struggling with.
As for Wheel Train a few different things have happened:
1.) I filed the paperwork to officially change the name of my LLC to Wheel Train so I can get things ready to integrate with a payment processor more easily.
2.) Work on user signup and authentication. I dropped the modal login/signup forms I had been using in favor of dedicated pages to make things easier, especially if the visitor is trying to visit a page that they need to be signed in for.
3.) My tech stack is Clojure/ClojureScript, I've been diving more into spec to help with data validation on both the client and server side with Clojure common files. It's actually really nifty only having to write the validation once and having it be able to be used on both sides.
4.) I was able to figure out a way to more easily integrate spec validation with human-readable errors for the client-side. It's not pretty and still needs some polishing, but the basic functionality is there.
5.) One of the days I was burnt out I went to a park with a large hill my recent ex and I went to this past summer to take a break, get out of the house, and get some sun. While I was there I was able to sketch out a few ideas of the direction I'd like to take Wheel Train with the services it'll offer as a watch marketplace. I haven't figured out how exactly this will be concretely implemented but I'm sure I'll figure it out.
6.) I rethought monetization. Initially I thought to charge flat rates for certain actions, however after some thinking I believe I want to do a mixture of subscription-based with commission. This is obviously still subject to change however I believe there could be a good use case.
There's still a lot of work I need to do before Wheel Train is ready. I'm not aiming for a MVP, I've always disliked that acronym and I'm aiming for SLC (simple, lovable, complete). See this article for more!
https://hackernoon.com/mindset-change-mvp-vs-slc-d087a7f87be3
It’s been 11 days since I completely threw away the product I had been working on part-time for the past couple of years to start building something new and focus on a new market. 11 days since I’ve made this project my full-time job due to unfortunate life circumstances. In this time I’ve been building out the underlying infrastructure, pulling together the necessary libraries that will help build what I need to do, and did a rewrite of the front-end to add support for mobile. I’ve always been a back-end developer throughout my career, there’s a lot of learning happening now in order to build out a clean and intuitive user interface that works both on mobile and desktop. On the plus side, I chose to use Clojure and ClojureScript as my back-end and front-end languages, luckily there’s the ability to share some code (specs and validation) between the server and client without having to rewrite it twice. It does make things a little more complicated however given I don’t know much vanilla JavaScript and having to translate things into ClojureScript, as well as figuring out how to properly interop different React libraries (Shadow-Cljs has been wonderful for this). I’m hoping in another 10 days I’ll be closer to something viable. Being a solo founder however, one of the things I need right now is a better support network to 1.) bounce ideas off of but more importantly, 2.) stay sane and help with my mental well-being. Hopefully I can find this on IH.
First commit
I've been writing software for about ~15 years, starting off with small basic scripts to automate tasks in video games to eventually becoming a professional software engineer and working at several large and small startups in the San Francisco Bay Area and now in Chicago.
Working at different companies throughout my career has been a valuable experience and I've learned a lot, however, I've always wanted to create my own thing -- create something I'm passionate about.
This is my first step.
