The side project I started last September finally had its first release. It's an AI-based reading log app, but honestly, I threw away almost everything I made along the way. So I'd like to reflect on that process.
At first, it was just a timer app for tracking reading time. But after hearing people say, 'Why not just use a time tracker?' I started thinking about differentiators. In the end, I decided to add a feature that automatically saves highlighted sentences from books when you take a photo of them.
Here's what I went through during this process:
1. I changed the OCR library three times - Tesseract's Korean recognition rate was too low, so I switched to Naver Clova OCR, then switched back to open source due to cost.
2. I split out the image processing server, then merged it back into a monolith - it's just easier to operate everything from a single server.
3. The AI summarization feature was harder than expected - since using the GPT API costs money, I replaced it with a keyword extraction algorithm for now.
4. I can't even count how many times I redrew the design in Figma - for a developer, spending time on design feels like the biggest waste.
In the end, the released app is about 70% different from the original plan. Still, I learned a lot from this experience. In particular, I deeply felt the importance of showing it to others early. If you keep it to yourself, it's easy to lose direction.
Going forward, I plan to prioritize getting user feedback at least once a week. My goal is not to make a side project that's just about development, but to build an app that people actually use.