2023 had its up and downs in terms of building and launching side projects so lets get into what happened and what I learnt.
Starting on a positive note, my Manchester Trams app turned 1 year old on August 8th and experienced huge growth from just a couple hundred users to 2.8K users as of writing this post. When I first started building the app, I had no idea it would be so popular and set myself a goal of 100 users to consider it a successful. Its had its growth periods (sometimes gaining 60 - 80 users per day) and its had its slumps, like recently where only a couple users have downloaded it per day, but overall it's doing extremely well for my expectations. I also recently added Google Ads to it and has since been making a profit every month.
I learnt a lot from this app, both in terms of skills (Ionic, Google Ads integrations, Google Payments integrations) and business; I now know its possible to create a decent side-income from ads and what it takes to grow an app. This has inspired me to release a couple more apps onto the Play Store in 2024 to continue growing the side-income.
On another note, I started writing weekly articles at the beginning of the year, primarily about Adonis 5 and kept the streak going until mid-June (26 articles, one every Monday). This turned out to be a fun experience with only one downside; I grew my Twitter following, my site's SEO and one of my articles still brings in 100s of views per month to the site.
On the downside, I was pretty disorganised and frequently ended up writing the article the night before it was supposed to be released. This lead to some articles being below the quality I would have liked. As I plan to start writing again in 2024 (You're reading the first article of the year), I plan to be more organised with a handful of articles being scheduled weeks in advance.
Additionally, I started a Youtube Channel and started showcasing some of the projects I worked on in my free time. Whilst I didn't put as much effort into Youtube as I did blogging, I enjoyed the whole process of ideation, filming, editing and releasing a video for others to watch. In 2024, I'd like to release more videos and potentially even livestream again.
ServerSinc is/was my most ambition side project to date, a complete server management and node deployment tool which took half of the year to build and took my efforts away from everything else. I started building the platform in early May and to this day don't think its ready to release to the public, but along the way I've learnt a lot.
Firstly, I learnt a lot of technical skills from starting this project. When starting projects, even if I don't plan on releasing them, I judge how much I'm going to learn from them so that even if they do fail commercially, I've learnt a lot for myself. ServerSinc was definitely one of those projects. SSH, Bash Scripts, Redis, Docker, Deployment techniques, proper WebSocket integrations, are just to name of the things I dove head first into to build this project, it was an exciting idea to me and still is, and the whole process of learning and building kept me up at night figuring out how to do things I'd never done before. Its made me a better developer all round learning these technologies and Im excited to apply them to other projects in the future.
I also learnt a lot about marketing or lack thereof. Many mistakes were made on this project including two full rewrites, changing tech stacks, cloud providers and feature creep. These mistakes lead me to abandon other things I was persuing (including blogging) to focus fully on building a working project. I did have many working attempts of a solution, but by November I'd lost the excitement for the project and abandoned it for smaller projects I could build quicker and ultimately more excited about.
However, as of writing this article, and having recently learnt Docker, I can say the excitement for the project is starting to build again and maybe we'll see a return of a working solution sometime next year.
At the beginning of the year, I released a Job Board for my home town and a Business Directory shortly afterwards. Whilst the social accounts of these projects grew quite a bit, the websites never really took off due to me making the sites too confusing for new users and I closed both of them mid year ish once work on ServerSinc had begun. However, I plan on reopening the Job Board early next year with a much more simplified approach.
Since adopting Adonis this year, I've wanted to expand the ecosystem around it and have started doing so with a handful of extensions for authentication and webhooks. Theres more extensions planned for the new year but those are for another article!
Overall, I did quite a bit in 2023 and would consider it a success. From growing an Android App, to working on my dream project, with smaller (more manageable) projects in between, blogging and YouTube, the year was very productive and I hope to continue this building fun things and writing about them approach throughout 2024.
Happy building! 😁