A 3-Month Retrospective on a Side Project I Built After Work
I built and shipped a web-based translation assistant tool on my own. It only has about 40 users so far, but this was my first time taking something all the way to launch by myself, so I wanted to write it down.
1. Planning took 2 weeks, development took 6 weeks, and everything else was deployment and bug fixing. I learned the hard way that operations take much longer than features.
2. Adding payments was the most annoying part. The Toss Payments docs are friendly, but I spent all my time writing test cases.
3. I should have set up logging properly from the start. I got by with console logs until an incident happened, and only then did I add Sentry.
4. The biggest takeaway is the sense of 'just ship it.' Shipping at 80% completion is harder than you'd think, but having done it has become a huge asset for my next project.
Next time I'm thinking of going mobile, though if I do it alone, it'll probably take another 3 months.