Solo Entrepreneur Public Accountability Thread

Jan 23-30, 2023 Update

Hours worked: 26.5 (22.5 hours from Jan 23-29)

What I did

• Deployed backend today for first time, and finally updated frontend today as well: https://yume.fyi

• A lot of backend work, authentication (JWT tokens + cookies), API endpoints so that one can share their posts/folders

• A lot of frontend work + cleanup, settings modal, login/signup modal, goto modal (ctrl+p, ctrl+k)

• code block on "```" (no space afterwards)

Goals this week:

I'd like the project to be ready February 1st, but if not that then definitely by this Friday Feb 3rd

There's a ton of stuff I could work on, but want to complete core features for basic MVP. Things like:

• Fixing various random bugs (most important now is folders only showing children one level deep)

• Frontend cleanup - eg. signing up should automatically login (or send an email confirmation link)

• Make UI/UX more clear around toggling posts public/private and previewing API as well as web builder link

• Reordering of posts (or can default to created_at, but let people edit created_at date)

• Default help folder with sample docs/previews

• Link to my default "brain dump" as an example (with blog, tech notes, travel, etc)

I should still keep the original launch order of:

• Replace personal blog/newsletter/sites with my application

• Launch basic MVP

I'd be content with getting in 30 hours or so, though it's more about getting things done (MVP for example) than hours.

Other Notes

• I've started tracking hours worked (inspired heavily by Cal Newport's book "Deep Work"). I think 4 hours/day is a solid target. I'll likely do more on weekdays (especially earlier in the week), and chill out more on weekends. Key is consistency. I'll be honest - I am finding myself often having to really push myself to work in the mornings - but once I get into it then I often almost have the opposite problem of not being able to stop. But I do believe there is a point of diminishing returns with work, and I don't want to get burned out, so I'm trying to set a stopping point when my hours are satisfied. It's my first week with the hour tracking experiment. Loving it so far, we'll see how it goes.

• Returned to Washington DC area from NYC last Tuesday

• Got let go from job last Wednesday despite having received nothing but glowing praise until that point for having shipped some pretty complex work. In any case this just further shows how important financial independence is, and I'll be going even harder on my project.

What I did last week:

• Build out drag & drop functionality including with folders where the result would show in real-time, but abandoned that approach because 1. it looks too janky 2. the code is very complicated and leaves too much possibility for bugs, and this isn't that important in the grand scheme of things / lower priority than getting the app done. At some point felt like I was losing the plot in this side repo so I stopped, went back to my main repo, and added a basic "move to" feature in the sidebar where you enter the folder via a text input. Super basic but gets the job done. Later once the more core features are complete, I'll go back and implement a simpler drag & drop (prob just using the drag API) like the one Notion or any IDE has b/c that's good enough.

• Redid sidebar to allow nested folders/files. Clicking on a folder will show a list of files within it, while still allowing one to edit that document. There's also a root file that shows all files/folders

• Starting working on authentication with a login/signup modal

Goals this week:

• Authentication (backend and frontend) with ability for users to save their posts to the cloud

What else is left for MVP

• Ability to save to other data sources

• Styling of pages

• Email notifications

• Custom domains

Launch order

• Replace personal blog/newsletter/sites with my application

• Launch basic MVP