Radeo
In general in last year or two (wfh? hehe) I realised that I receive more and more spam for email addresses I don't share at all.
I've also created a small email-forwarding service [1] that I and few friends use for public sharing like conferences or sketchy services (of course I don't mean Amazon here ;) )
The project idea was pretty simple - assist restaurants with creating and posting their menu online with no cost and no effort.
Motivation behind project: - Plenty of family/friends struggling during the pandemic months - Having my project 'my baby' where man can focus on all aspects of the business, not coding only - Solving the specific problem of hosting multiple subdomains with no/zero effort and maintenance cost - Extending skillset above coding SEO, marketing, building the audience, blogging - Not really profit-oriented, but for sure with ideas how to cover cost of bigger traffic if it comes to that
Highlights/lessons: - Tried out interesting architecture - Get a better feel of AWS services - Realized how nice alternatives are - Netlify, Vercel, FaunaDb (ending using both stacks for cost effective solution) - Finally go a legit reason to try FB and Google ads (the former are pain in the ass if you don't exist on Facebook) - Did some digging for alternatives and included them on the blog - https://blog.emenu.today/ (even added this very post there)
Fails: - Overcomplicating UI/UX - trying to go with unique design instead of casual and familiar bootstrap style for the user - Literally close to 0 users, way more bots signed up for it lol - Maintaining 3 separated pages/projects - landing page, app itself and the blog - could easily be squeezed together in one repo for simple pipeline, editing etc. - Diving into offtopic - like looking the simplest blog editor/creator - for me it was Hexo - hexo.io - Not picking the better idea - recently even FB added the menu tab (still it requires editing menus, generating images and uploading, but people are used to that) - Probably not pushing harder
Any comments, questions welcomed.
Cheers guys!
Remember after every failure you are richer - experience is gold and no1 can take it away from you.
Best experience in my life, I have learned a lot about myself and that world outside pure IT can be even more astonishing and challenging. Psychological leap I would say, advancing to new level. Despite my friends who couldn't understand with I sacrificed my top salary (yeah, I had it best among my programming friends).
Though I failed (yeah, can admit that proudly, because I tried) and I am back in my profession, with even higher salary then before 1-year challenge I got much better perspective now. I try to widen my horizons more often and in different ways. Oh, and after few months break aiming to jump back into trading on my own account... Real fighters never surrender, right?