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Diary of a solo dev building a web app
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Did you ever wonder how software is built?
Not a few page summary of a year-long process but detailed, day-to-day activities?
Here’s my experiment: I have an idea for a web app. I’ll be building it and take detailed, daily notes about what I’m doing.
You can follow my journey of building a web app.
My app is https://filerion.com/, a file manager for the web, that supports S3, Dropbox, local files etc.
Oh yes, don’t expect it to work well just yet. Sometimes it won’t work at all. This is a work in progress.
I’ll be posting updates at https://twitter.com/kjk
Some of the posts will be tech notes i.e. a deeper dive into how to do something.
Day 0: the idea
Thoughts on developer productivity
Day 1: tech stack, creating project from scratch
Day 2: displaying list of files
Day 3: Dropbox
Day 4: s3, sorting, remembering credentials
Day 5: setting up a website
Thoughts on getting user feedback
Tech note: Dropbox login
Day 6: Dropbox fix, bug fixes and small improvements
Day 7: context menu, file delete
Day 8: more file delete, file upload
Thoughts on documentation
Day 9: Dropbox upload
Day 10: s3 file delete, ui tweaks
Day 11: upload file to local fs
Day 12: s3 upload and delete directories
Using Roam Research for productivity
Day 13: local fs fixes
Day 14: image preview, file rename
Filerion marketing
Day 15: text preview
Filerion tech stack
Day 16: bookmarks
Day 17: file download
Day 18: improving s3 upload
Day 19: analytics, context menu
Day 20: fs refactoring
Day 21: s3 create new dir, last modification time
Day 22: file properties
Day 23: file copy
Day 24: dialog refactoring
Day 25: Google Drive support
Day 26: more google drive support
Day 27: better Google Drive login, One Drive support
Day 28: OneDrive support, more file properties
Day 29: optimizing file representation and s3
Day 30: better dialogs
Day 31: tweaking bookmarks list
Programmer productivity: lines of code edition
JavaScript optimization story
Day 32: optimizations, backblaze
Day 33: more backblaze
Day 34: more backblaze, refactorings
Tech note: JavaScript debugging helpers
Day 35: fixed onedrive, gdrive token refresh
Tech note: speed of iteration in programming
Written on May 14 2022.
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