I'm starting to develop a product 'Wobu' aka Work Buddy. But why? I strongly believe that there should be a pressing need or a strong motivation to build a product, especially when you are doing it solo. So what's my reason?
I have a good number of years of experience in the software industry. I worked in enterprises and performed different roles across domains, and regions. I then started my own software company where I developed three solutions, that catered to multiple clients. It's been 4 years now since I embarked on this journey. I've had a lot of ups and downs, moments of triumphs, moments of disaster, lot of learning, both technically as well as running a business.
When I look back at my career, especially my entrepreneurial venture, I learned something new every single day. Be it picking up new tech, finding a new product, talking to a prospect, testing using a new tool, or understanding a new domain, wow, it was a lot. Before that as well, there were worthwhile experiences.
Ok, so what?
I never made a note of all the work I did, where I did well, where did I go wrong, what could I have done better, what fuels me, and what puts me off. Reflection is one thing, capturing those reflections is another.
I'm in a stage where I need to dig into my past (concerning work) and come up with stories. I'm just relying on my memory and my old emails. This is when I thought "How nice it would have been if I'd journaled things related to work". Personally, I journal on and off, but never regularly. Concerning work, I hardly captured anything anywhere.
This is when I thought why not build a simple web app which will make me capture things related to work? Of course, there are already a lot of journal apps, note taking apps, then why another? I'm a huge user of notion, so much that I added way too many pages and finding something is not easy 🙄. I tried Evernote for a while (more as a task list). I think these tools are too good with a lot of features and options, but is an overkill for my need.
Also, I have some ideas and unique requirements that will prove to be useful for people planning to attend interviews, appraisals, work-related discussions. thus I decided to build myself one.
I plan to share this journey of building Wobu, more from a technical angle. Hence I decided to write a series. A series of short articles with key learning points.
Here's the brief plan
As and when I complete a logical step, I shall capture it in a post. For example, I will write a short post on how I set up my workspace. A post on what tech stack I intend to use and why. A post on the database setup. This means there may be multiple posts a week 😁
On the way, I may change my decision to move from Option A to Option B as well. For example, today I'm thinking I'll use Sentry for monitoring. When I come to that stage I may probably change to something else.
Why am I writing this in public?
Many reasons:
Primarily to share my learning, so that it may help someone else who's stuck with a similar problem
Keeping me accountable
I plan to build an app for work-related journaling. Logically I should start documenting from Day 1, isn't it? 😉