I'm Building, Not Just Learning

I'm Building, Not Just Learning

I've spent a lot of time learning software development through tutorials, courses, documentation, and small experiments.

But recently, I've realized something:

You don't really understand software until you try to build something that actually needs to work.

That's why I've been working on FinLedger, a personal lending and borrowing ledger application.

What started as a simple idea quickly turned into something much bigger.

I had to think about things like:

• How should transactions be structured?
• How should lending and borrowing records be connected?
• What happens when a person completely repays their balance?
• How should past records be handled?
• What happens when an existing person is added again?
• How should the UI behave as the application grows?
• How do you keep the architecture maintainable?
• How do you deploy and manage the backend?
• What happens when the codebase becomes large enough that changing one thing breaks another?

And that's where the real learning started.

I'm currently exploring Android development with Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, while also going deeper into backend engineering, databases, APIs, system design, Linux, VPS infrastructure, and self-hosting.

I'm not trying to learn everything before building.

I'm building, finding problems, understanding why they happen, fixing them, and then building again.

That's what I want to document here.

I'll be sharing the things I learn while building real software — including the mistakes, architectural decisions, debugging lessons, and solutions that actually worked.

This is the beginning.

Let's see where building takes me. 🚀

#android #kotlin #jetpackcompose #programming #buildinpublic