I'm sure you've read about "building in public" somewhere, probably on social media or even among one of your friend groups. This post is exactly about that.
I'll use this platform to document my journey while building something, although I don't really have any particular product in mind. I'm not here to convince anyone that I'll change the world, all I hope is that I'll find something cool to work on and eventually make some money out of that.
Who are you?
I think it makes sense to talk about me a little.
I've been a software engineer since 2011. That's the year I got my first job in the field, although I've been always kind of a nerd and have been studying/playing with programming since I was a kid in the mid/late 90's.
Since that first job, I've focused my skills on iOS development for two main reasons: it pays the bills, and I kinda like Apple's development platform (it's not perfect by any means, just to be clear). But over the years, on my free time I also played with a bunch of different languages and tools. I consider myself a full-stack engineer, although my CV pretty much just mentions iOS-related skills.
In these ~13 years of experience, I've worked on companies of all sizes: startup/small, mid, big tech (not FAANG though). Even tried having my own startup with some friends around 2016, but unfortunately we weren't financially prepared to make the jump and that didn't end up very well. That was a great learning opportunity, at least.
I currently have a 9-to-5 job as an iOS engineer, and I can't complain about it. I'm in a great company, with a great team, the pay is decent. However, when I think about my long term life goals, this is not enough for me.
What's your goal?
The title of this post explains that well enough, I believe. I'll build something, even if I don't even know what it will be.
So... how you'll achieve that?
A lot of people go with the "fail fast" mentality and sometimes it works for them, and I'm happy for those that make it. I like to fail fast on experiments, proof-of-concepts, prototypes, or anything in that sense. Not in production, not with real users.
I prefer to take my time experimenting and then deliver something nicer. I'm not in rush to deliver anything to anyone, I don't have deadlines and didn't make any promises. I don't have investors, I'm paying for everything out of my own pocket, at least for now.
Having said that, I'll start with setting up and/or building my own platform (in a broad sense). I'd agree it kind of doesn't make sense to build a platform if you don't really know what you're building. However, there are things that are useful regardless of the end product. Maybe even this platform could end up being a product itself, I don't know.
Think of all the stuff a successful company usually has: an internal network (VPN), user management, databases replication, secure storage, analytics dashboards, and so on. That's what I'll start with.
Sure, things like analytics dashboards are definitely not a priority if I don't have a product to run analytics on, but it's still good to have that kind of thing in mind when creating the architecture of the platform as a whole. It's not too much work to get something running and ready to be used once I start working on the actual product.
Maybe the easiest way to explain what I have in mind is: I'll be building a company that will have software-based products. I don't know what those products will be, but I have an idea how I want the company to be, so I'll start by building the infrastructure for that. An analogy in the architecture world would be that I'm going to build a building, and once I have that done I'll find a business to place on that building.
When do you start?
Technically I could say I've started a few months ago, since I've been spending a good amount of time experimenting with different tools and technologies for all of that. My previous post sort of marks the time when I started it all. I feel like I've experimented enough with those things, so now I want to make the jump and start doing it for real, in "production", and will be documenting my process on this series.
Starting from the next post, things will be probably be more technical as I'll be setting up the first elements of the platform.
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