I am writing about my experiences as a developer and indie hacker.
Some errors are easy and simple. Quick fixes you get resolved in minutes. Others aren't and you got to dig in for much longer than you would like to. This was one of these for me. I'm sharing my solution here to make it a bit easier for other developers. This problem seems to affect especially Linux users like myself. I can't confirm this for sure as I run only Linux 🐧️ On my elementary the issue…
Clubhouse is the new kid on the block. It's a social media network... or maybe not. At the moment, it's not actually 100% sure what it actually is. I actually haven't tried it out. But in a conversation with a friend who's a marketer , I've already learned some interesting stuff about FOMO. Those who know me, know for sure I'm not a fan of (over) hyped stuff. Yet, somehow Clubhouse managed to get…
GPT-3 can already write, design and code. DALL-E is generating images faster and more creative than any human ever could, at breakneck speed. If that's not enough to impress you, the next (or following) iteration will blow us all out of the water. Google has already trained the next generation model of a GPT model. Computing power gets cheaper and easier to access. From here on, AI will only…
I'm always surprised by people looking for the magic bullet to solve problems. Individuals are always on the lookout for the ultimate shortcut; the one trick no one is using that works like magic. Statements such as "If I had a shortcut to make this work..." , "If there was a quickerway on completing this task..." aren't unheard of. Why is this so puzzling to me? It might sound strange at first,…
Sometimes you learn some "natural" rules when you've been doing something for a while. Being an indie hacker is no different. Over time, I've identified these rules for my work on bootstrapped indie projects: Projects don't need to be complicated. Check out this one - it's literally a Google Sheet and a domain. If you don't need to have a complex solution don't overcomplicate it. "I can build a…
Chris McCormick (chr15m) recently announced on Indie Hackers: "Holy heck this is hard" - and rightly so. Being an indie hacker isn't as simple and easy as it's often presented online. It's not just putting a little MVP together over the weekend, submitting it in on ProductHunt and getting the cash flowing. It's mostly hard work without knowing if you'll end up with a winning product or not. It's…
The Problem: "Specified key was too long; max key length is 767 bytes" One of these issues you might stumble across using the PHP framework Laravel is this one: Specified key was too long; max key length is 767 bytes After some research, I've found out it's coming up when using older versions of MySQL (prior to 5.7.8) or MariaDB (prior to 10.2.2). It was MariaDB in my case. Solution #1: In Laravel…
No one seems to be immune to procrastinating, myself included. Some people get drawn into social media, for others it's YouTube or ProductHunt. I, however, tend to lose whole days on Wikipedia and development communities. Everyone has their poison. If you really are one of these odd people who don't know what procrastination is, check out this video: Got distracted again while you should have…
Spatie's Laravel Components are surely known to most and are great helpers to build any kind of Laravel application or website. I've been using the Laravel Backup component on my projects. With my recent shift to Laravel Nova on my new project BiteSizedInsights.com , I've started to look at the related Nova component . It worked fine, once I got over some initial trouble. Once completed installing…
Marketing is a challenge. Everyone who has built anything on the web knows that. I've watched many great projects go under due to their makers and founders not knowing the basics of getting it noticed. I've spent much of last year learning content marketing and am still on it. I'm not claiming to have the ultimate recipe for overnight success, but I know that putting yourself and your idea out…
A little different post than my side-project or coding-related stories. Don't worry it's not about the Chinese virus Covid19, at least not directly. I've been using the Lenovo X1 series since my time in New Zealand. It's an amazing light laptop with great support for elementary OS . The current one is my third one. The first one was employer-issued and the second I gave to my partner so she has a…
What is a sitemap? Sitemaps are xml-files containing structured data about the pages of the website. Each page has an entry similar to this one: <url> <loc>https://startupnamecheck.com</loc> <lastmod>2020-03-06T20:31:03+00:00</lastmod> <priority>0.9</priority> <changefreq>monthly</changefreq> </url> What are sitemaps good for? Sitemaps are helpers for search-engines to discover all relevant pages…
Occasionally, I get the feeling that not everything I build needs to be a commercial project. While sustainability is an issue, I still believe there is a realm for free and open-source projects. In some cases, the core value provided by a side project doesn't justify the additional work to add payments and the required management infrastructure behind it. Naturally, this leads to a project with…
Not all side-projects need to lead directly to a business. Some might just be an experiment, a tool to build upon as mentioned in my other article or a simple helper for yourself. Coding can be relaxing for some. Over the recent Christmas break I wanted to work on a project idea freely — without the pressure to produce something to make money. Naming Tools is the result. It's a simple website/tool…
Online business in 2020 isn't what it was in 2000, or even just a few years ago. Things are changing. The old idea of companies being closed, unapproachable entities is coming to an end slowly. While for bigger and especially for publicly-listed companies some legal requirements to publish certain information existed for a long time, nothing similar exists for small businesses. For some companies,…
Thanks to Juan Betancourt you can read the article in Spanish as well now 😍️ When sudden inspiration strikes you, nothing is better than getting started building your next project straight away and not losing momentum. After all, no story of genius-inventors talks about due diligence and planning. However, this might be exactly what you need to look at to avoid ending up with your startup or…
You have had a great idea, spent some time validating your business idea and are now facing the next questions: How should I approach building it? One of the most used buzzwords in the indie hacker space is “building in public“. It comes in different styles and with different methods. Of course, success in building a side-project publicly also varies. I aim to provide a starting point in this…
Intro This weeks edition is a bit shorter as I'm preparing to go to Europe in a few days. The upcoming trip will probably require some more flexibility on the publishing side of this weekly side-project list. I haven't planned everything through so I'm not sure how it will work out. Naturally, there are also other responsibilities along I need to keep up with. Devlids is collecting art-work from…
Intro With starting this list I've begun to collect more and more ideas. Whenever I find something interesting I put it in my notes and select some interesting side project ideas and projects Help others accessing the Tor Network using the “Snowflake“ extension Make your website faster by pre-fetching content while idling Do keywords research where you search — on your search engine Make your…
Intro Today's edition will be briefer as I'm on a visa-run in Penang (Malaysia). I'm actually writing this from the public bus to the airport. I still got more than enough interesting side projects for you to check out. This time with these projects: Is my website ready for launching? Find out with websitelaunchchecklist.com “Close my tabs“ to manage your tabs smarter “metomic“ - a smart GDPR…
Intro Here is no. 3! If you haven't read about the previous projects you might find the first list of side projects and the second list of side projects of interest. If you got any feedback for the list or want to leave the makers behind the project a comment reply to this tweet , please. Here we go with some neat side projects and their makers: “Ecosia“ — the search-engine that plants trees 🌳️…
Intro Following last weeks “first edition“ of neat indie projects here are some more interesting indie projects. I've discovered these projects in the last week mostly. If you got any feedback for the list or want to leave the makers behind the project a comment reply to this tweet please. Let's get started: “TrackThis.Link“ — Mess around with analytics data Don't like being tracked around the…
I'm definitely a fan of cats 😺️ in real life, but when it comes to code this reverses and I've got a preference for Pug 🐶️ For those who aren't coders: PugJS is a JavaScript template engine. It converts Pug-lang into HTML. I know there is more power in PugJS, besides the simple turning the Pug-lang into HTML. At the moment I'm not using the potential of the language - I use PugJS mostly to hold…
Intro As an indie maker, I suffer from the same issue as many other makers: I can't do marketing. I struggle to market my side-projects and earn money on my indie work. I see and hear this in many conversations in the indiehacker space. To help a little, I want to talk a bit about some neat indie projects I've discovered recently. Here we go: “Time Well Spent“ — see pricing as working hours. See…
As part of my journey to become permanently independent from employment and contracting, I need to learn marketing for my side projects . I think that's inevitable. Not too long ago, I've read "a project is 20% building and 80% marketing" somewhere. As it turns out that is very true. SEO and marketing were the top topics for me and Treesukondh in the last months. I'm still considering myself a…
Not too long ago (around a year), I started out in the maker space. Back then I've just discovered ProductHunt and IndieHackers . My focus was still on employment and my commitment to a long-running startup. The idea to build small, independent businesses grew slowly on me. Around this time, I've decided to build something and give it a try. I thought "worst-case, I learn something" and started to…
Building a side-project should be fun. Coming up with a good idea, validating it and building a business are all very different, yet exciting challenges. You will never have as much freedom as you have on your own truly 100%-own project. This article is for those, who haven't found the one idea they are planning to work on for the next months or years. It hopefully gives you starting points or…
Sometimes all the planning and thinking about a project is too much. You just got to jump in and build something. That's what Jess and I did last night. We spontaneously decided to roll out a random, unplanned side-project: Random Elon . Random Elon returns you a randomly selected Elon Musk quote. You can then share it directly on Twitter to show your love for Elon. Powered by TailwindCSS, plain…
What is Do Not Track? Do not track is a user preference to not being tracked by Google Analytics or similar services. If active, it is sent as an HTTP header with all requests going out to servers. Depending on the browser you are using this is switched on by default in private/incognito sessions. How to check if DNT is set using JavaScript? In some cases, you might need to find out if DNT is…
There are minor, but often important differences between temporary loaded browser/Chrome extensions and extensions, which have been installed via the Chrome webstore/Mozilla Addon store. These can be tricky to debug, as they appear only in limited circumstances. Here is a list of differences, I've been identifying while developing my browser add-on: Chrome and SVG icons aren't going well together…
Recently I've rebuilt my blog (this website) using Eleventy and Netlify . Being an engineer, I like to enhance and improve my websites. Sometimes I submit my websites to services that check them to identify new areas of improvement. These services are for example broken link crawlers to find links which aren't working anymore or securityheaders.com , a service to check the HTTP headers for…
Previously I've written about the story why I've built WhichLogin . Now it's time to go a bit deeper and share more about the excitement and stress on launch day. Exciting: Getting ready for launch day Even with detailed preparation and testing you will never know for sure if everything goes as expected. There are hundreds of details that could potentially go wrong. Going live is never just a…
It's been a regular day: Client work is keeping me busy as most days. I'm working on several things at once. I'm coming back to this site. I'm signed out again. Okay, no big trouble. Just click the login link and I'm back in the game. The little popup comes with three social media logins: Google, Facebook and Twitter. I remember vaguely that I used one of these — but I'm not sure which one. I…
Even in 2020 many developers are used to spinning up a WordPress (or similar software) for content websites. Until recently I've been one of these developers. I was willing to develop a website using technology to get done what I could get done without. My choice of framework wouldn't have been WordPress, but at the end the result is the same: building a system to deliver what a static publishing…
Netlify is a powerful, yet easy to use platform to host your website. Combine this with pug and it gives you a great starting point to build and host your own website. What is Pug? Pug or PugJS, previously called Jade, is a JavaScript template engine. It assembles and combines your final HTML from different files and gives you a much cleaner development experience than plain HTML. How to configure…
I'd like to share my experiences and lessons from completely rebuilding, then 'fine tuning' for too long (aka procrastinating), and finally relaunching my little pet side project Startup Name Check . As you can imagine there were lots of frustrating moments and of course great people who helped along the way. But let's not jump ahead. Just a heads-up — If you hoping for a "That's how I started…
Being a developer by heart makes any kind of marketing and promotion a foreign ground. It cost me some time to overcome the weird feeling coming with publishing and talking about my little side project Startup Name Check — a tool to save time when you're researching a new name for your next startup, band, side project, hobby, etc. ProductHunt startup name check was ready for a few days before I…