Hi All,
I worked for years in Corporate America as a 9 to 5 cubicle monkey. I saw how much revenue a lot of these big enterprises were racking in. And I thought to myself after years of growing their products, why not just build one myself?
It doesn't have to be big, hell, I don't plan to knock anyone down from their castle. I just want some of the crumbs!
So, I decided to build a full enterprise platform, from scratch, alone in my evenings while having a day job.
And 5 years from that decision. It was done.
Just little old me. I had to LEARN not have AI do it for me. Well, I would be lying if I didn't try that route first LOL.
Now, in all seriousness. I had quickly realized if I shipped a product where I had no idea how it worked let alone what it fully did felt not only dangerous and reckless but questions came to me like how would I maintain it if something broke or when package updates were needed how would I accommodate those?? Or if data was being handled correctly and safely!?
More or less, there were a lot of reasons NOT to have AI just build something and send it out into the world without a care, let alone slap your brand on the side of it and call it a day.
Now outside of the development side of things, I had to learn the other tricks of the trade UX Design, Cloud Architecture, UI Design, and dare I say it (UGH Marketing...).
Anyways, launch day happened. Or well, at least I thought it did, or would, anyways. Fighting Kudu terminal, the GitHub deployment workflow, the Azure Web App Service IP addresses getting those to connect to the database, just one thing after another was wall after wall after wall.
Until, it wasn't. Connected!
Once the coast was clear and everything appeared to be working that big scary enable for public access configuration toggle was the next move.
So, I called my wife and mom who were emotionally supporting me throughout the journey and we did the big famous countdown...
3...
2..
1.
LAUNCH!!!🎉🥂🥳
Technical errors..
Thankfully after just a weekend I was able to finish my fight with environment variables and just like that, live.
The idea was originally around jobs for contractors but I realized there's actually value there for full-time roles as well:
Forcing a recruiter to choose if it's remote OR hybrid not oh hybrid counts as remote (no it doesn't)
Mandatory days in office or communicated UP FRONT or if the candidate gets to choose
You learn what the actual project is you're working on not the general skills you'll need
You get to see what the paycheck looks like ahead of time (gross)
When you'll get the first check (and if it's normal size or different since it's the first check)
If it is remote, what timezone you have to work
And also a few niche pieces like laptop shipping, and interview availability to send ahead of time to help recruiters move faster
It's definitely still a work in progress. The good news, I have a small bill to maintain it since I've built it from scratch. But nevertheless, it is a full enterprise built from scratch platform.
With that being said, it'll handle traffic so it's not a matter of if it will succeed but when, and it's just me so I can easily pivot.
Later in the journey full analytics and reporting from scratch with d3.js is on the list once I have a few months of data established.
My next beast, see how the general public reacts to it, and learn the next skill--Marketing.
And with that, I invite everyone to try it and let me know what you think.
Sleepy
Product Manager,
Designer,
Architect,
and Enterprise Business Owner
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