Secret Project maker log

Thursday. February 14, 2019 - 4 mins cosmin

So, I got an idea a couple of weeks ago and since ideas means nothing, I decided to put in the fucking work and implement the shit. I hope this vocabulary gives you a sens of the emotions I’m experiencing right now.

So, here’s a log of my daily progress:

Day 1 (February 11, 2019)

Setup template for my next project (Rails project with PostgreSQL db)

Pretty easy tasks, worked aproximately 2-3 hours.

Day 2 (February 12, 2019)

Finished the template with TailwindCSS for frontend
Added users to the app (thank God for devise)
Added admin panel (thank God for activeadmin)

I usually work on this project, 2 or 3 hours after my gym session. So, I wake up at 6, listen to the news until 6.15, take my preworkout juice, hit the gym. By 9 I’m usually home and I get straight to work on this. At 11 I have my first meal of the day. Usually I finish the work with this project right before noon.

Day 3 (February 13, 2019)

Added GitHub integration to the project
Added Sentry integration to the project
Added SendGrid integration to the project
Added Sidekiq integration the project

Damn, that’a a lot of integrations, right? In Rails these things are so easy to do, it’s literally just adding some gems to you Gemfile and then write a config file for it.

Day 4 (February 14, 2019)

It’s all about the dashboard integration and the UI

Added some style to the dashboard of the user
Talked with Braintree to open the payments account
Integrated React components to Rails
Added Organization model and implemented GitHub logic to extract organizations.

This was cool and a little bit challangeing because I don’t like doing frontend work, and TailwindCSS is not very friendly in this sense, but I don’t want to get a Bootstrap theme just because I want the design to feel unique.

Braintree process is quite slow usually, and they require a lot of information. I just told them I’m doing alone my projects, don’t have a name for the product, and obviously, no domain yet. So I explained them that I do solo things that might get $0 per month, so there should be no risk for them.

Day 5 (February 15, 2019)

Couldn’t really get shit done today, I just gave some thoughts on what features should I add next, and what to display on the dashboard.

Also organized a Toptal Roundtable event in Zurich, so I’ve been travelling and couldn’t keep up with work

Day 6 (February 16, 2019)

Been partying with my roomate who moved to Zurich for his master’s thesis, so I was pretty tired, went to the gym and washed my clothes.

Filled my damn taxes, takes so much time & effort.

Day 7 (Febuary 17, 2019)

Nothing done yet, this is the third day I’m not shipping features.

Day 8 (Febuary 18, 2019)

Shit, today I must add something, at least something. My calendar is full as the 2nd semester just started. I’m literally writing this while I’m eating my late breakfast. Still got one other consulting project that I have to finish. Actually two, with deadlines in the middle of March. In March, I’ll also go to a hackathon in Switzerland, first time participating in one here.

Day 49 (April 8, 2019)

I wasn’t able to continue on building this on my own since I have to study for my courses and I have other freelance projects. After succesfully working alongside a friend on a project, I decided to ask him if he would like to join the project. So, two more people joined me in building this. For the past week we’ve added some the repository and team members import. I’m sure we will be able to push each other on our lows. Meanwhile, I’m still struggling to design and implement the landing page to ship and gather potential customers / emails as soon as possible (I think this exact strategy is advertised in ‘The Lean Startup’). Overall I’m very happy that the product will continue and I hope the launch will make people interested in it.

Here’s the link to the current version of the website, and here is the current version of the landing page.

Will report the progress hopefully on a weekly basis.

Comming up next, stay tuned…

That’s all,

Cosmin

Cosmin-Ionuț Rusu

A simple action-taker who likes to just do stuff