Wednesday, March 23rd, 2022
A couple of times now, I've gone to sit down at my laptop, excited to build something new.
Within 10 minutes of trying to build this new thing, I'm hit with having to set up environments, create accounts with Stripe and Firebase, and configure AngularFire for the 100th time.
If I make it through that gauntlet, and have any motivation left, I'm then hit with another realization that I'll need to create home pages, contact pages, new styles; everything from scratch.
At this point I usually close my laptop and park the idea - it's just too much work setting everything up.
Yesterday though, I had a realisation that this is really dumb. I've built things like authentication and payments so many times - why do I keep torturing myself?
Therefore, I decided to build a tiny project template. The goal was to never have to set up all these things ever again.
I took Paper Website, and stripped out everything to do with converting notebooks into HTML, just keeping the core elements I've built over the years. Mainly:
I did this until I was left with a tiny frontend and backend, which I saved on Github, and can now use as templates for all new ideas.
It took maybe 6 hours to create - but it was a worthwhile investment if I'm going to continuously keep building new things.
As soon as I have an idea, I can now rapidly build it and launch it using an environment I'm super comfortable in. There is no barrier!