The following is, hopefully, the first post in many weekly posts about the projects I get up to from day to day. Whether its testing out new frameworks, or adding things to existing projects, I aim to write a summary of anything and everything I got up to.
This week I spent a lot of time build, and recording, a new todo list app for a domain I bought recently; abigtodolist.app. So far, I've got 3 episodes ready to release on Youtube and at least 2 more to be edited.
I've kept the MVP checklist short, and have a few items left on it before I launch. As per usual, I've set an "End of Month" goal to get it out into the world for The People™ to use.
I've also been writing about how I've been building it, check that out here
Building a mini-SaaS with Adonis v5 - Dev log 1
In an effort to revive my dream side project, I've been exploring solutions and mostly brainstorming ideas on how to change the inner workings of ServerSinc.
Originally, the idea was to have an app running on a server, and for ServerSinc to manage setting up NGINX, a database (usually MySQL), firewalls and the app itself without any sort of containerization. However, after trying this (and getting it working a few times) I realised it wasn't going to work reliably every single time someone wanted to deploy an app.
Fast forward to this week, I had some time to test out Buildpacks (recommended to me by @joshmanders) and after a bit of setup work, I got the pack CLI tool to build a simple express app into a Docker image ready to be published. For this to work, I used the heroku/builder:22 and the test-express-api repo on my Github.
This solves a critical part of ServerSinc which was building node.js repos without dockerfiles into Docker images and with a bit more work I think I can automate the process completely.
This week I also tried out React Native, so far just getting a project setup. My goal with this project is to see how easy it is to build a simple app with the framework and compare it to my existing tools (Vue + Ionic). If it proves to be a good developer experience, then I can see my next few apps being built with it for the experience. More to come on this in the future
That's all for this week, happy coding! 🧙♂️