Building in Public as a CS Student (After a Year in Production)

My app crashed 47 times in one week. That same month, my Firebase bill hit $300 because I didn't understand read/write pricing.

By that point, the app had been live for nearly a year and reached 50,000 downloads, which meant every mistake was expensive and public.

Nothing in my coursework prepared me for production. Shipping to real users forced me to learn cost management, backend scaling, monitoring, and what "it works on my machine" actually means, all through mistakes I couldn't ignore.

Turns out the best teacher is production breaking at 2am. School never covered that.

I'm a CS student who ships software to real users and writes about every lesson it teaches me.

Here's what I write about:

• Why your app crashes at scale, and what testing actually misses

• Firebase and backend mistakes that cost real money

• Decisions that matter after your app gets its first 1,000 users

• What breaks in production that never shows up in tutorials

Next post: Why my app crashed 47 times in one week, and the one monitoring tool that would've caught it before users did.

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Currently debugging to: [Așa – Bibanke]