Always be shipping

Always be shipping is a term often coined by indie hackers. I'm not a indie hacker, at least not yet, so maybe I don't fully grasp the meaning. But I read it as "make it work and get people to use it" in stead of perfecting something that maybe never sees the light of day.

Build products

The point of this blog post is to mark a moment where I decide to ship more. I eventually want to build products that people love to use. And that will probably take some failures (maybe even a lot of them) before I get that right. But I'd love to start somewhere.

I have a few ideas in a Kanban board. The first idea on the board was to rebuild this blog. I already had a blog, built in Astro. But I didn't love Astro. And therefore my blog became neglected. As part of my "ship more" movement, I rebuilt the blog in 11ty. I think I will probably rebuild it once more in the future, because I'd love to use Go for it. But I quite like 11ty's approach, so for now this is fine. Other tickets on the Kanban board need some more work to figure out if I like them enough to continue to the building fase.

Go and Docker as my tooling

What I can tell you is that I will use Go as my metaphorical weapon of choice in my projects for the forseeable future. A few years back, during the christmas holidays, I gave Go a... well... a go. I felt productive quite fast, which is pretty amazing. Go is simple enough to be easy to grasp if you already know a programming language. Over time I kept coming back and really enjoyed building things with it. So now it's kind of my tool for every project.

Another thing I already know for sure is that my projects will be dockerized. It took me a while to really understand the benefit of Docker. But lately I've invested some more time in getting to know it and I really love how easy it is to ship a compose file with the product and have another developer up and running in minutes. Same goes for the deployment, docker makes it so easy to meet all the required on the server.

Write more

From this moment on, it is my intention to write more as well. First and foremost I'd simply like to write more. Even though I eventually ended up doing something different for my career, I did study journalism and I always loved writing. So let's do more of that. Secondly, I'd like to document the steps I take and the decissions I make when building a project. I think it will help my thought process and hopefully it will be beneficial for others to read about it.