rajatsx

I am subscribed to a lot of newsletters, hence I created a newsletter collector/reader to keep all the newsletters away from my inbox.

https://lttrs.email

As someone who is a programmer at heart, I have always launched new software projects for the last decade or so. Almost all of my projects tanked as I could not market or position my products efficiently.

Naturally, I want to recommend learning marketing if your goal is to earn money from your products where you can sustain yourself from your own products.

I am currently researching how we can use AI at my current employer. We did not have any AI knowledge to begin with.

I was quickly able to write a web scraper using Python in a few hours by employing ChatGPT. I hadn't touched Python in like 12 years before that day. It wasn't just a generic scraper. I asked ChatGPT to fine-tune it to a). crawl pages belonging to a certain domain b). save data inside a specific directory with specific filenames.

Before that, I asked it to write unit tests for a React component. It did and I got 100% code coverage for that component. Our manual test suit had around 87% code coverage for that component.

Having said that, it constantly requires human intervention to judge if the produced output would work and how to integrate a piece of code produced by it into the actual projects.

These days I prefer Next.js + MongoDB for full stack apps. Pushing changes to a repo and have it deploy automatically feels like a super power.

I have a moderately complex project, which is built using Next.js but it uses Yarn workspaces (for code sharing) and Docker (for deployment) but I waste a lot of time putting out fires w.r.t this setup than actually building features. I am thinking about doing away with Docker and Yarn 2 to keep the setup simple.

I run a SaaS product and I do not charge my customers extra for a subdomain of their choice (if it has not been claimed by someone else already.)

I think Jugaad is quite similar to what Jake Knapp suggested in his book "Sprint". https://www.amazon.in/Sprint-Solve-Problems-Test-Ideas/dp/15...

My one-man-SaaS setup:

- A single VPS server to host the app. I love DigitalOcean.

- A single docker-compose file to bring up the entire stack containing the front-end, the back-end and the database.

- Caddy for automatic SSL certificates and proxying.

- JavaScript/TypeScript for building stuff.

- Cloudflare For DNS

Why is Supabase as costly as Firebase? Why would I go for a service that's in beta and charges as much as a stable competitor?

That's so true! Not long ago, I wrote an Ansible playbook to install my open source software on a DigitalOcean VPS. I devoted so much time to learn Ansible as I had zero experience with it. I think I almost kept on working on that playbook for almost two months. Even after that, I was buggy.

One day, I just woke up and had an epiphany that a BASH script could do the same! On top of that, the end users would not have to install Ansible in order to run the playbook.

I was not expecting it to work flawlessly with my open source LMS CourseLit which I am currently building as CourseLit still has rough edges. But it did!

I was able to collect the analytics from my website and the setup was easier than that of Google Analytics. Great work.

I used to create Android apps and had quite a few apps listed on Google Play. I never made any money.

I was disheartened and started teaching coding on YouTube.

I have more subscribers than the number of downloads my apps have ever got and made almost $3K from teaching coding.