My first week trying to complete 12 projects in 12 months.

Wow, this week went fast! It feels like the days went faster than normal. Already seven days have passed from the first month of the twelve months I will spend working on twelve projects. How did this first week go? Keep reading and find out.

I started on the 1st of January with this challenge to overcome my everlasting procrastination. Not being able to finish a project has been the story of my life ever since I’ve tried to build something for myself. I think a lot of you can relate: you get an idea, write it down, work it out in your head and/or even start building and then it hits you. Self doubt, loss of interest or other “better” ideas. Finishing a project you start is actually harder than it looks.

But I’m determined to change this, so on New Years I started developing my own website as my first project. I wanted to start with this project first because I want to use my website for the remainder of the challenge. I want to use my website as a showcase for the projects I’m doing and have done. I also want to use the website to host my blog posts. So hopefully this will be my last post on Medium.

Day 1:

So let’s dive into the progress I’ve made during the past week. As I said, I started on the 1st of January. My normal behavior would be to start immediately with development, but because I’m building this all in public I thought it would be better if I made sure that was all set up. I dusted off my Twitter, created a banner using blackmagic.so and already sent out some Tweets. After that I updated the tools that I was going to need for the project:

• Upgraded Visual Studio 2019 to 2022
• Updated Beekeeper
• Upgraded Visual Studio Code

After this, the time I could spend that day had nearly passed, so I quickly cleared all files from the web root of my domain. There were some leftovers, on the server of the hosting provider, from previous attempts to create my personal website.

Day 2:

On Sunday the 2nd of January I had a bit of time while my baby daughter was sleeping, so I sat down at my desk and worked on the plan for this first project. With the limited time of just one month it is essential to have a clear plan. A clear plan also prevents you from getting too wide-spread in all the stuff you want to do. Perfectionism is the enemy of progress, but as it comes to my personal website I find it hard to block those perfectionist thoughts in my head. A clear plan, a description of the MVP really helped me in determining what I should develop and what can be placed on a backlog for later.

I added a bunch of to-do items in Trello, marking them with a label for each aspect of the project. I’m still not sure if this is something I will keep doing, but for now it’s a start. This whole challenge will be a learning process on every aspect of building a product. Technology, design, project management, marketing and sales, I think I can still learn a lot on all of these aspects.

I started with the tech side, created a GitHub repository and created a new web application project. This out of the box project will enable me to quickly put something together.

Day 3:

I got the advice to use Notion through a response on Twitter, so curious as I am I had to check it out. I haven’t done a lot of projects myself and during my full-time job I don’t work with Notion, so it was completely new to me. What can I say, I was a bit overwhelmed with the possibilities and didn’t really understand how everything worked. And then it hit me: why am I looking at this? I need to build my website in a month, I don’t really have time to check this out. At least, not at this moment. When I’m more in the flow of developing and finishing projects, I might want to take more time discovering other tools. For now, I just use the tools that I know. Even if that’s just a file on Google Drive and Trello, that is fine for now.

After my research I spent time on putting the project architecture together. I wanted to use an architecture based on the clean architecture put together by Jason Taylor. I set up the first couple of entity models and connected the solution to a MySql database.

Day 4:

Today was the first day at my new full-time job, so I didn’t have a lot of time to work on my website. Lots of information, lots of new people, lots of meet and greets so I was pretty exhausted at the end of the day. But I tried to squeeze a bit of work out, to at least make some progress.

The only work I got done was some work on the database entities. But I did came across something else. Using the clean architecture I came across MediatR, which I had heard about earlier but never used before. I wanted to look at this the next day, but after a late-night walk with my dog I decided that I will throw everything out and start again the next day. I needed to keep it simple, nobody cares about the infrastructure of a product and certainly not my own website.

Day 5:

On Wednesdays my wife doesn’t have to go to work, so the only thing I have to do in the morning is give my baby girl her bottle and walk the dog. After that I’ve got about 1,5 hours of time to work on my project. As said, the day before I decided to throw everything away and start over. Fast forward 1,5 hours and I made more progress than the previous four days. It got to me that I needed to keep things simple. Nobody cares about the infrastructure, so there is nothing wrong with putting it all into one monolithic project.

So I deleted everything I did the past few days and started over. Adding the database models, view models, controllers and pages. Created the database context and connected the project to the MySql database. I even managed to do a little bit of design work.

Sometimes it’s best to keep it simple. Use what you know, build the minimal you need, don’t over complicate things. I find that sometimes easier said than done, but as with all the other things this will be a learning process as well.

Day 6:

Thursdays are a busy day, I need to bring the baby to daycare, so less time to work before my workday starts. I worked some more on the database models, made sure there is an admin user and prevented visitors from guessing the register page. Using an out of the box Web Application with Identity framework, the registration of users is enabled. As I’m the only user of my website, I wanted to have the login functionality without the option to register. This was the quickest way to achieve that, so for now the best option.

I also worked on a base model for my visitor faced pages. That base model contains everything each page could use and makes sure I’m able to pass data to the layout view if needed. I chose Bootstrap as the framework to design my site, as I already have used Bootstrap before and I understand it better than Tailwind. I made some improvements to the basic template, uodating the header and the footer of the page to reflect the pages I will be adding to the website.

Day 7:

This day was all about designing the homepage. I must admit I’m pretty proud of what I put out there as I always struggle with designing stuff. This time I already had some clear thoughts on how I wanted it to look, which made it easier to put something together. I spent about 1,5 hours on it and that contained about 20 minutes figuring out why ml-auto didn’t align my navigation items to the right. As it turned out, it was because I was sort of used to Bootstrap 4, but am using Bootstrap 5 now, so it is ms-auto. Sometimes you are so focussed on looking for the mistake, that you oversee these things. Lessons learned, Google is your friend (and StackOverflow your BFF).

So the first week has passed and I’m quite happy with the progress I’ve made. This weekend I will work some more on the design of the homepage and blog pages and will try to squeeze some time in to work on the admin page, so I can start adding blog posts to the website.

Online presence:

At the end of each weekly blog post I want to reflect on the growth of my online presence. Starting with 24 Twitter followers, many of them friends that don’t use Twitter at all, I’m now at 78 followers, so an increase of 54. I’m sure that will improve as time passes, but for now I’m happy with the progress. It’s great to find like-minded indie hackers, working on similar projects.

My first post on IndieHackers ever got 53 upvotes, 81 comments (of which about half from me responding to others) and a whopping 2500 views. I don’t know if that is a lot, but it’s certainly more than I was expecting. I’m absolutely over the moon with this result. As a result of this post I also got 25 followers on IndieHackers.

The post on Medium took a bit longer to get traction but at the moment it has gotten 419 views. Most of the readers came from IndieHackers, but also through Medium itself which is great. The article got 35 claps, which is more in terms of readers / clapper/upvoters ratio than on IndieHackers.

Overall I’m absolutely happy with the way my first post performed. It wasn’t easy to put myself out there, but I can already feel I’m more confident today than I was just seven days ago.

Thanks everyone for reading, make sure to follow me on Twitter. Let me know in the comments what you think of me, my project, my writing, any feedback is highly appreciated!