Spencer Pauly

I build useful products and the systems behind them.

Product-minded engineer. Based in Minneapolis.

Current projects

A habit calendar that lives inside my notes

Project · 2026

I used to track habits on a whiteboard calendar, marking an X on every day I worked on a side project. When I needed the whiteboard for something else I moved to printed calendars taped to…

Building my own fantasy football draft board

Project · 2025

Every year I go into my fantasy draft with a list of players I like, and every year that list falls apart by round three. The rankings you find online are averages. They tell you where a pl…

E2E tests that survive moving a button

Project · 2025

At one point I merged what I thought was a harmless UI change. I moved a button. Dozens of E2E tests failed overnight, and none of them had found a real bug. The tests weren't catching prob…

Tracking my lifts without another gym app

Project · 2025

I've been going to the gym consistently for a couple years, and the tracking part never stuck. Every lifting app wants an account, a subscription, and a tour of its features before it'll le…

A tiny service that keeps my APIs warm

Project · 2024

Serverless is great until the first person to visit your app in a while has to sit through a cold start. Nothing is broken, but the app feels slow, and slow is the impression people keep. T…

Turning Notion pages into a real help center

Project · 2023

A lot of small companies already write their documentation in Notion. It's where the team lives, so it's where the knowledge ends up. The problem is what happens when you want customers to…

The app I built for cross-country skiers

Project · 2020

Cross-country skiing has a funny information problem. Whether a trail is worth driving to depends on conditions that change by the hour, and the people who actually know are already out on…

I rebuilt one of my first coding projects

Project · 2019

One of the first things I ever coded was a small tool to look up my most listened to Spotify tracks. Spotify only hands you that list once a year with Wrapped, and I wanted to see it whenev…

Writing

New year, new habitsI've always liked the idea of tracking habits. A couple years ago, I had a large whiteboard and I would draw a calendar and put an…2026 I ditched my blogging platformMy blogging journey started 5 years ago on Medium. I had a blast writing on that platform. Then, I moved to Ghost and put my writin…2025 Introducing TestingBee.io!!!A few years ago, I was building a product, moving fast, shipping features daily — until my test suite became the biggest bottleneck…2025 Integrating AI with Obsidian – how I make notes easyI've been using Obsidian for my note-taking workflow, and I want to share an overview of how I use it and why it's incredibly helpf…2025 I'm working on a new product :)For the past month, I’ve been building a new SaaS product, and today I’m excited to share a sneak peek of it with you! This is part…2025 GymThis is just a brain dump of how I program my weightlifting. This isn't really a guide or strategy for how to get optimal results.…2024 Feelings and CompetitionPicture yourself and a hundred other souls stranded on a remote island. You wake up and jump right into the daily grind of hunting,…2023 Today I Start a 15-Day Productivity ChallengeLast week I woke up to an email from my friend and fellow bootstrapper, Tyler Dane inviting me to join him and others on a 15-day p…2023 Tech I'm learning in 2023Guys I'm gonna be honest, I think I'm at the beginning of becoming an "old man" in tech. What I mean by that, is that I've become m…2023 Final days in EuropeI'm currently sitting in a coffee shop in Copenhagen. It's one of my last bits of travel before returning to the U.S. A victory lap…2022 7 Common SaaS Dashboard Mistakes — How to FixSaaS dashboards, like everything in life, are a compromise. They’re a constant battle between functionality and ease-of-use. And, l…2022 My first month in EuropeExactly one month ago, I quit my job, sold my things, and booked a flight to Europe. The destination? My dream city of Amsterdam. T…2022 Best practices for naming hooks & props in ReactAs a developer, I think two of the most challenging things in software are (a) naming things and (b) figuring out best practices. B…2022 Some tips for founders to destressThis week has been extremely stressful for me. I made a tweet last week about moving: <Tweet author="Spencer" handle="spencerpauly"…2022 Regaining productivity as a bootstrapperThere's a lot of great advice online to build better software businesses. The common wisdom includes "start marketing before you st…2022 The importance of connections🚀 Product update: 2 new engine customers this week 🚀😄! yay! I'm very independent. And I'd argue that if you're building a bootst…2022 Firsts shouldn’t be so hardStarting something new shouldn't be hard. But, it is. I think Newton's first law explains why this happens. An object at rest will…2022 Introducing the container pattern – a better alternative to ReduxRedux would've been a fine solution for state management two years ago. But, these days, with how mature the React Context API has…2022 The ideal tech stack for building cross-platform apps in the modern eraLet’s entertain a simple scenario for a second: You’re a solo developer. You have an idea. You tell the idea to your friends. They…2022 How to type React Context with TypeScript – and why is it so painful?The other day I was converting a JavaScript component to TypeScript and I got tripped up in one specific area: React Context. Now d…2021 The Best Design Pattern for Managing Forms in ReactUghh… why does form code in React always get so messy? It starts out simple: a <formcomponent, a couple input fields, and a submit…2021 Progressive Web Apps — the future of mobile?Progressive Web Apps (PWA’s) are becoming more widespread every day and when you see their benefits it’s easy to understand why. PW…2020 The 9 Month Solo Development Journey of SkiwiseSkiwise is an app I’ve been developing with the goal of connecting cross country skiers with a network of their peers to share know…2020 10 Non-Traditional Hacks for Incoming Computer Science StudentsAs we approach late August, the time is coming for college classes to kick off again. Whether your school is online or in-person, I…2020 Why I Switched Away From Google Firestore – and don't regret itGoogle Firestore is Google’s propriety NoSQL Document-Based Database. Paired with the rest of the Firebase suite such as Cloud Func…2020 Why didn't Deno take off?Deno is a Javascript / TypeScript runtime looking to take the place of Node.js as the status quo. It boasts a wide slew of features…2020

A little more

Independent builderProducts, interfaces, and the operational details.

Cross-country skierUsually thinking about trail conditions.

Always writingLong posts and tweets belong in the same archive.