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Technical learnings from the first quarter of work on watchlimits
You can still use side projects to grow as an engineer without sacrificing the business success of your product. There are no guarantees that the business will succeed, but I believe that regardless of the business outcome you should try to end up smarter than when you started. This post is a retrospective of my technical learnings from my first 3 months of working on watchlimits.com (chrome extension to limit excessive video watching).
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My release checklist for chrome extensions
Many products can be updated very quickly. You spot a bug, you push a fix in next 5 minutes, sadly for chrome extensions it’s not like that. When you update a chrome extension in the chrome web store you submit a package that then goes through a lengthy review. It can take multiple days and during that time you can’t update a newer version, for example if you find some bugs.
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How I find time for indie hacking while having a full time job
A friend recently asked me: “How do you find time for all your projects while working full time?” “I don’t, I just complain about not having enough time instead.” But more seriously, I am working on two products, while having a demanding full time job and doing a lot of sports (7+ training sessions per week). Ok, I’m in my late twenties and I don’t have kids, but I do have a social life and a spouse that wants to do stuff together.
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How to make a product on gumroad and earn some money (#secretunasaladrecipe)
If you’ve been in the Indie Hackers circles for a while you probably heard about people like dvassallo@ who made hundreds of thousands of dollars selling simple digital products on gumroad. Make a thing, put it on gumroad, earn money, could it all be that simple? I have heard many good things about the platform and I wanted to try it out with something straighforward. I didn’t feel like I had some super valuable secret I could share that I could make into a killer course, but…
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Sometimes stupid product ideas are the best - motivation behind the secret tuna salad recipe
I created a digital product out of my family’s favorite tuna salad recipe and in this article I will tell you why I thought it was a good idea. I’m a software engineer by trade and I have spent thousands of hours building software products that don’t really earn me money (yet). Entrepreneurship is risky, that’s for sure, but often indie businesses fail because founders lack marketing skills and fear to put themselves out there until it’s pretty late.
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Decimals in python, Django and your DB
In programming we use numbers a lot. For counting integers are quite nice, but for many use cases we need “real” numbers which apart from integers also include numbers like 1/3, square root of 2, etc. Typically these are approximated with floating point numbers based on base 2. Traditionally we call them
floats.floatsare great for many use cases, but they have their issues. -
Invertimo Binance Crypto Integration
You can now import your binance Crypto related transactions to invertimo.com (open source investment tracking app). Why track crypto transactions in invertimo? Invertimo helps you track all transactions related to your investments as well as dividends and received income in one place. Crypto is becoming more and more mainstream and more investors have part of their portfolio in crypto assets. Selling crypto is a taxable event in most countries, swapping tokens is usually treated similarly.
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Browser caching with Django & Webpack
Fetching stuff from the internet can be a lot of work and take a long time. What if your browser could save itself all this work and return you the result semi-instantly? It just needs to save a file locally and return it to you next time you want it. We call it browser HTTP caching. Passive operations like
gettingthe page will usually be cached. This is great as long as the file at this address doesn’t change. But the thing is that it often does, especially if your site is under active development. -
Building Invertimo in the open (as open source)
As far as building in public goes, it’s hard to go more public than making all the code public too! I am building the Invertimo (investment bookkeeping and tracking software) completely in the open. It’s a complex web app written in python and JavaScript. I submitted 200+ commits over last couple months. Github repo. I got the rights I work at a bit tech company that by default owns everything that I build.
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I prefer boring technologies
When I start new projects I try to build them with boring technologies that I used before and I try to limit picking up new libraries, tools and technologies to a minimum. This is because I want to build actual products and not to do projects for the sake of learning exciting technology. I chose boring technologies because: they are proven & dependable I can focus on building a product challenges specific to a product keep it interesting and I don’t need shiny tech novelty If you want to build cool things, you should consider doing the same.
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