markjgsmith

I unnoficially launched Linkblog.io yesterday on Indie Hackers. It's been a long road with a seemingly endless onslaught of showstoppers, but the site is up and running and it's built with a strong architecture, and running on a stable infrastructure with the possibility to scale if necessary.

There was modest amount of hits from around the globe and I even got a comment, which was at least partially positive. After a few hours I realised that I had no way to differentiate between server-side side and client-side analytics. Oh noes!

So today I setup some new views and filters using custom dimensions to show each type of data. Things are looking much better now. :)

If you're intersted in signing up, there is a promo code on the indie hackers post, your entire first year for the price of a few cups of coffee.

Building a web application as a solo developer ain't easy. There are an insane amount of things that need to be done and an almost unimaginable amount of decisions that need to be made...but it's possible.

I wanted to take a few minutes to reflect on some of the things that I've learnt along the way:

• selecting the right technologies
• setting up consistent development environment
• using unix/linux tools effectively
• building a deployment pipeline
• architecting the app
• building a scaleable infrastructure
• testing, linting, logging, debugging
• securing components
• scripting and automation
• setting up server side and client side analytics

If you are a solo developer / small team just starting out on your building journey, feel free to get in touch tell me a bit about yourself. All these things are very fresh in my mind right now, and I am available for consulting gigs! Investing a bit of time and money now might save you weeks if not months of headaches later down the line.