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Three times I've built a product for developers, and three times it got commoditized before I finished it. Why the audience that watches hardest is the one that never pays, and the single question I now ask before writing any code.
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 the wall. Seeing months of progress stacked up next to each other w...
I'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 X on every day where I wrote some code towards a side project. When I needed the whiteboard space, I switched to marking an...
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 player usually goes, not where you'd take him. So I built a draft ran...
My blogging journey started 5 years ago on Medium. I had a blast writing on that platform. Then, I moved to Ghost and put my writing on spencerpauly.com. I wanted a central hub for my content. Ghost was perfect – it had a beautiful editor, elegant themes,...
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 problems, they were just reacting to selectors that had shifted a few p...
A few years ago, I was building a product, moving fast, shipping features daily — until my test suite became the biggest bottleneck. Every small UI change would break my E2E tests. Fixing them quickly became a full-time job. My test suite, which was suppos...
I'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 helpful—especially when combined with AI. What is Obsidian? Obsidian is a powerful knowledge management app that stores notes as p...
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 particularly exciting for me, as I haven't launched a paid side project since Engine. And although I’ve built things between then...
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 let me write down that I did five reps at 185. So I built the smalles...
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. The fix is embarrassingly simple. Ping the thing so it never goes to...
This 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. There's plenty of those guides out there. Personally, I feel like the difference between "good" programming and science-back...
Picture yourself and a hundred other souls stranded on a remote island. You wake up and jump right into the daily grind of hunting, fishing, and cooking. It's simply your way of life. But, one day, as you struggle to catch elusive fish, a spark of ingenuit...
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 read it. Sharing a raw Notion page works, sort of. But it doesn't l...
Last 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 productivity challenge. <Image src='/content/images/2023/08/Xnapper-2023-08-15-21.28.01-1.png' alt='' /The premise is simple:...
Guys 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 more opinionated and resistant to change than I used to be in the past. Two years ago, when I built things my opinions on that...
I'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 in a sense. And it feels like a victory lap. <Image src='/content/images/2022/12/AF1QipMMuPD8cxhl0OJsTCyTbfa9rC3K5QkYk9dOsy...
SaaS dashboards, like everything in life, are a compromise. They’re a constant battle between functionality and ease-of-use. And, like most compromises, they typically do a bad job at both things. I’ve identified these mistakes and distilled them into one...
Exactly one month ago, I quit my job, sold my things, and booked a flight to Europe. The destination? My dream city of Amsterdam. This was motivated by many things, but ultimately it came down to three main factors: freedom of location, freedom of time, an...
As a developer, I think two of the most challenging things in software are (a) naming things and (b) figuring out best practices. Both of these things have many ways of accomplishing the same goal, so it's hard to know which way is recommended. That's why...
This week has been extremely stressful for me. I made a tweet last week about moving: <Tweet author="Spencer" handle="spencerpauly" date="July 24, 2022" url="https://twitter.com/spencerpauly/status/1551324602764337153?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" Unpopular o...
There's a lot of great advice online to build better software businesses. The common wisdom includes "start marketing before you start building", "build in public", "validate your business idea", and more. And don't get me wrong, this is great advice! But,...
🚀 Product update: 2 new engine customers this week 🚀😄! yay! I'm very independent. And I'd argue that if you're building a bootstrapped software business you probably are as-well. How do I know that? Well, think about it! You have no funding, no team,...
Starting something new shouldn't be hard. But, it is. I think Newton's first law explains why this happens. An object at rest will remain at rest, and an object in motion will remain in motion. Of course Newton is talking about motion, but I think it appli...
Redux would've been a fine solution for state management two years ago. But, these days, with how mature the React Context API has become, is it really a good choice anymore? I'd argue it's not, simply because the alternatives have gotten so good. Today, I...
Let’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 like the idea. You design a prototype. You spend months on design, code, art, marketing, and then the time comes for you to r...
The other day I was converting a JavaScript component to TypeScript and I got tripped up in one specific area: React Context. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve used TypeScript a million times before, but for some reason Context was not clicking with me. So I we...
Ughh… why does form code in React always get so messy? It starts out simple: a <formcomponent, a couple input fields, and a submit button. But soon things get a little more complicated. You think, “hmmm.. I want some more validation for this zip code field...
Progressive Web Apps (PWA’s) are becoming more widespread every day and when you see their benefits it’s easy to understand why. PWA’s are proven to bring about higher customer engagement, higher customer retention, and increased conversion rates to your w...
Skiwise is an app I’ve been developing with the goal of connecting cross country skiers with a network of their peers to share knowledge around trail conditions, social events, weather changes, and more. Originally beginning in November 2019, I’ve been wor...
As we approach late August, the time is coming for college classes to kick off again. Whether your school is online or in-person, I believe there’s a handful of things you can do to make this year a success. This article is a collection of tips for compute...
Google Firestore is Google’s propriety NoSQL Document-Based Database. Paired with the rest of the Firebase suite such as Cloud Functions, Firebase Auth and Firebase Storage this can look like a pretty attractive tech stack for startups or solo-developers l...
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 and has a lot of hype around the project with almost 68,000 stars on Github: <Image src='https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max...
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 the trail. So in late 2019 I started building Skiwise. The idea was...
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 whenever I felt like it. Years later I went back and rebuilt it. Same ide...
