What I Learned from Shipping a Toy Project in 3 Months
I finally shipped a side project I started at the end of last year. It’s not a big deal since it’s a service I built alone and use alone, but I’d like to think there’s meaning in having done the whole thing from start to finish.
What I built is a simple reading log app. It scans a book’s barcode to pull in its info, lets you leave a one-line thought, and shows monthly stats—that’s about it. It has fewer than five features, but it took me three months.
Looking back at where the time went:
1. 2 weeks on planning — but 80% of that plan changed while I was building
2. 6 weeks of fumbling around — all spent on auth, deployment, domains, and payments
3. 3 weeks on actual feature development
4. The remaining 1 week — polishing the UI
Three things I took away:
First, features are genuinely quick to build. The problem is all the grunt work required to show them to someone else. Things like CI/CD, environment variables, and error logging. These were areas that never improved just from studying development alone.
Second, it’s better to plan briefly and build fast. I carefully designed the screens in Figma, but as I built, I ended up not using half of them.
Third, working alone makes it hard to stay on course. There were several moments when I wondered, “Why am I even building this?” and each time, feedback from people I know who tried it out gave me a big boost.
Next time, I’d like to get more experience with the post-deployment operations phase. Though with only 10 users, calling it “operations” is a bit embarrassing lol.