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 … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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' … | Continue reading
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 O … | Continue reading
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:
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 additio … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 d … | Continue reading
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 met … | Continue reading
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 o … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 launc … | Continue reading
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, … | Continue reading
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 twe … | Continue reading
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, besi … | Continue reading
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 abou … | Continue reading
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 tr … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 fou … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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/i … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 crawl … | Continue reading
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 ever … | Continue reading
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 medi … | Continue reading
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 wou … | Continue reading
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 yo … | Continue reading
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 peo … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading