"Ideas are cheap, execution is everything."
-- whoever said it first.
You've maybe heard the above cliché way too much, I agree, it's over used.
None the less, hope I did not loose you just yet because hear me out. We only have a finite amount of time in the day, so how do we decide on what project to execute well?
If you've built even the smallest website by yourself you quickly realise that it's fairly quick to make the bulk of the website, but it takes forever to squash all of the imperfections.
"Some people still use the 1260x960 resolution? Who would've thought!"
-- Me.
So if you are like me that has a day job + family, and wants to try some ideas out quickly without breaking the bank, not doing a rubbish job and see if it might be possible to gain some momentum of the product or toss it in the landfill (a virtual one, real ones should be banned.);
How to make the best of it?
My current plan.
Open Source headless CMS
I'm a frontend developer, I understand it's good for me to branch out and write my own backend, but I also want to release something reasonably good to the world within a reasonable timeline. I can write my own backend for fun, I'm talking business here.
It's just hard to compete with something that is free and have 100's if not 1000's of developers working. There are caveats and each comes with its pros and cons, but being open source we can work around them for ourselves, or we can decide to contribute the code back into the main project by a pull request.
In the coming weeks I'm going to make a deep dive into the different headless CMS systems out there, and I'm going to be recording my findings so stay tuned. (pssst. probably strapi or ghost.)
I would be very interested to hear your thought's on the matter!
How do you set yourself up for quick feedback on your side projects?
How do you pick a project to spend your time on it?
Oldest comments (1)
Awesome! Please let us know about your findings.
From my experience, I have used React.js and Airtable for faster turnaround and lightweight projects. When it comes to CMS, I've used Wordpress + GraphQL + Gatsby.