indie maker

My first 2 months indie making

- Aside from my job as an Engineering Manager, I started to work on an idea. Here are the questions I had, my thoughts and my struggles.

It's been 60 days since I've started to work on an idea. I will share on the internet what it is piece by piece as I am making up my mind on it. Basically:

  • it is a Figma's like infinite canvas
  • on which you see your team tasks and their dependencies
  • the main goal is for your brain to put a task in a 2D space and not in a column that represent its state

Its little name is "Cadence".

1st learning: build without mockups but good defaults

It's the 3rd side project I have started and yet the only one still alive. I think it is because I don't spend so much time in Figma designing what I want it to be, and then stopping everything because I know all that design is going to cost a sh*tload of time 😅 Funny how my own mockups demotivates me.

I've started to use tailwind CSS a couple of months and got it: I don't need a mockup. Let's go piece by piece and we'll see.

And woo-hoo ! 2 months done and still want to continue.

2nd learning: closed source now, open source later

I strongly believe in Cadence 🙂 However, I don't code full time on it. So I spend weeks wondering if I should open source it or not. Because I am a strong transparency by open sourcing believer !

After some consideration, and seeing other products on the internet, I have decided that I'll get that transparency making my software local only. Thus, anyone could inspect the network layer and see there's nothing wrong about the software...

3rd learning: local only

...plus there's a ton of advantages of being local only:

  • no server
  • no server cost
  • no server security

🤩

My main struggle: get an audience on Twitter

I know I need to get out there and meet friends on the internet.

I took this excellent course from Kevon that really changed my behavior on Twitter: be natural, genuine, reply, quote, retweet, engage privately.

I hope I'll get results !

Bonus ⭐️

4rth learning: Flutter is a great choice to avoid my product from being copied

After trying to code my product in React, stop, and rewriting my product in Flutter for performance matters, I realized that I got a new big advantage on the web:

The product is shipped to clients in Web Assembly.

Meaning:

No one can understand that compiled code. Nor change the style and host it somewhere else, and market it better than me.

Nothing important here, as in JS you can obfuscate the code. Still... Cherry on top 🍒.

Counterpart: there is nothing like tailwind in Flutter. But Material is ok for now.