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I’m not the kind of person who keeps a tremendous amount of tabs open in their browser because I have a feeling that it makes me inefficient, but for years, Gmail was the app I almost never closed. Mainly because I felt the urge to respond to an email as fast as possible or if it was something unnecessary I wanted to dump it so I can get close to inbox zero. After a while, this became a habit and I felt I had a great control over my inbox.

Last year, when I was working on The Maker Report and completed the survey myself, I summarized my year with a relatively short sentence: This is hard! And I really meant it. Taking the first step is easy, it’s a different story to keep walking.

2019.12.09-13.

Short summary:

• 🤖 Someone is working really hard to hack my server
• 🎉 The maker report got 50+ responses
• 🏗️ Started to work on my yearly review

2019.12.09-13.

Short summary:

• 😥 Lost a Discount Hunt customer
• 🏗️ Added extra fraud protection tools to CreativeDevJobs
• 🎉 Finally launched The Maker Report

2019.12.02-06.

Short summary:

• 📝 I started to collect and upload positions to CreativeDevJobs
• 🏗️ Made a few adjustments on the Gift Hunt, Discount Hunt and Story View landing pages
• 🥳 The guest post about Gift Hunt went live
• 🐞 Found a bug in CreativeDevJobs and someone used the job posting process to test stolen card information

2019.11.25-29.

Short summary:

• 🏗️ Gift Hunt updates about pro features
• 🥳 New Discount Hunt customer
• 😔 I have to pay for another monthly service
• ✍️ I finally finished the guest post about Gift Hunt
• 🤗 Another great chat with a fellow maker

Short summary:

• free version of Gift Hunt is live
• landing page changes
• Google Ads for Discount Hunt
• virtual meeting with a fellow maker

Short summary:

• I decided to create a free version of Gift Hunt because I think I can't reach the necessary amount of people without submitting my plugin to the WordPress plugin directory
• for the Pro version I have to offer something that users will pay for and I decided to add features that will make it possible to customize the appearance of Git Hunt
• I don't want to work on these features for more than a week, at the end of this week, I want to submit the free version to the plugin directory

This is my first weekly backlog post. Writing a summary at the end of every day about what I was working on makes it a bit easier to get over the feeling I'm not doing enough. Although, I still have mixed feelings about the results.

At the end of last week, I reached one of my yearly goals. I've read 6 books by far and while I updated my goals subpage I also realized that by the end of the year I'm not going to publish 30 blog posts if I don't change my writing habits. So, that's what I'm doing now :)

Well, I can't say it was an easy ride, but it's finally here. Today my first Shopify extension went live on the app store. Here are a few things about why I built it and what I learned during the process.

For years I was always the one who wasn’t 100% satisfied with the end result. When it was possible, I wanted 120%. And I always found something that (I thought) could be better.

tl;dr

• I decided to participate in Fixathon
• I used Node.js, Express, and MongoDB to build my product
• this happened right after I finished the Learn Node course, so I can't say I was an experienced Node.js developer
• I could almost finish all the functions I wanted to
• the platform is live and looks like it works fine as a few users just registered on it

In July, I didn't launch a standalone product. Instead, I was trying to enhance the ones I shipped previously.

Before starting to write this post, I just realized, that the upper part of the Chestnut tree, standing in the backyard of our building is almost dead because of the heatwaves in the past few months. I hope it’ll get better but by taking a look at the weather forecast, I can’t say I’m optimistic about it.

It's hard to admit, but probably I am the bad actor in this situation.

6 months just passed by since I left my manager position to become a fulltime “maker”. I can’t say everything goes as planned, but when I look at the big picture, I think, I’m going in the right direction.

When I started web development, there were a bunch of free options to host the sites I created. Most of them offered 200Mb of free space and a custom subdomain (It was about 15 years ago). Today, developers have much more and much better options to push their sites or web apps online, and they don't even have to pay gazillions of dollars. I collected some of the free options I use to host my static sites.

tl;dr

• I decided to participate in the Product Hunt Makers Festival
• ended up building my first desktop app
• had to learn the basics of Electron, Node.js, Express, React, GraphQL, Apollo to accomplish my goal
• spent a ton of time by watching and reading tutorials just to make the basic authentication process work
• had dreams about the issues I struggled with
• finished in time and didn't lose all my hair during the process
• to manage your Maker Goals on Product Hunt right from your desktop, head over to makergoals.netlify.app

Have you ever felt while reading an article that it would be great to get just a short summary of it to find out if it worth your time to read the whole thing? I had the same feeling while I was traveling home for a long weekend and was trying to catch up on the latest news about Avengers: Endgame.

When I started the "maker life" at the beginning of this year one of my goals was to try at least one new technology with every product I build. This is a summary of the things I learned while building 5 tools in the past 5 months.

As more and more brands are moving to Instagram the need to have the right tools that can help to overcome the weaknesses of the platform is getting bigger. TWiS (The winner is) is one of these tools. With the help of it, you can manage your Instagram contests in your business accounts much easier.

Are you one of those developers who likes to play around with animations, new tech, VR and all kind of other stuff that needs developer skills but also some kind of creativity? Maybe you are one of those special kind of developers.

It's been more than 4 month now since I "started a new life" and I can't say everything goes as I planned. To date, I launched only one (free) product mostly because some bad decisions.

At the end of January I launched my first product, the HashtagCalendar. My original goal was to create products that will generate a passive income and as a free product, HashtagCalendar doesn't seem to help me achive this goal. Or does it?

tl;dr

• Based on RescueTime reports my productivity was ok, but I don’t feel that way
• When I have to deal with repetitive tasks, I got distracted easily
• It’s also hard to stay motivated during these tasks
• Tested the pomodoro technique to stay focused » didn’t work, looking for a new solution
• Need to organize my tasks much better » looking for a new TODO app, installed Notion, haven’t really tested it yet
• First product launched 🚀 (but it was a silent launch)

When I first left my day to day job back in 2009, my goal (dream) was to create products that could generate enough revenue to cover my basic expenses (food, clothes, rent, etc) so I could spend more time with learning and experiencing new things without the fear of becoming homeless if something goes really wrong 😄