In November, I decided to publish two of the side projects I’ve been working on. Somewhere between my regular work, personal life, conferences, and writing, I’ve been slowly chugging along with coding. And it was so fun! Rarely in everyday work do you start something entirely new and bring a fresh idea to life. I had a chance to begin with a concept and quickly iterate towards “passable” for a release. Because these sure aren’t perfect.
The first app was supposed to help air travelers with information not available anywhere else. Some parts of the world were getting ready to lift the 100ml/3.4oz liquid limit in carry-on bags thanks to new scanner technology. I wanted to be the first to collect information about airports that have these new scanners. The app would allow you to find out whether you need to worry about the size of your liquids when traveling to your destination.
Sadly, the EU put the change on hold due to problems with the new scanner software. I decided to release the app anyway because I already had all the other information about airports collected in the database. So there’s no liquid limit information, but everything else is there: official websites, locations, airlines involved, etc. I’ve already seen it become useful for people looking for reliable information about smaller airports.
What was cool about working on it? Well, figuring out the deployment and coding sure was exciting, but getting all the data for the website was the biggest challenge. I needed to use multiple data sources, resort to some light scraping, and have an LLM process all of this. I actually did the whole process with little coding by using a self-deployed instance of n8n. I also figured out getting newsletter sign ups, gathering feedback and programatically getting photos for content - as described in the linked articles.
The second app is just a simple collection of browser-based tools. I often need to format some code or perform other small data transformations on the go. I don’t feel comfortable pasting any data into available offerings, so I decided to create some of these tools for my own use and release them to the public. It’s more of a training project; I’ve used AI heavily to code it. It didn’t take that long, and I borrowed many solutions from Airport Registry when building it. The most useful and novel tool is the one that allows you to find the exact date of a LinkedIn post, since LinkedIn hides it. Especially useful when you’re working in social media.
In general, working on these two apps reminded me of how many problems you need to solve when building products. Deployment, UI design, backend, database setup, backups, security, marketing, content creation, and so on. And these two didn’t even need user management, payments, or support! I noticed that the second time was much easier because I had a lot already figured out.
My takeaway, quite obvious really, is that once you solve each of these problems, in your next project you can focus on what matters—creating something valuable for your users. So I plan to keep building and, while doing that, create a set of solutions that I can reuse in other projects. I feel that having this kind of know-how is key to building small products on my own and is also a huge advantage when building with others within companies.
How did the projects perform in December? Nothing extraordinary—and that's perfectly fine. The Airport Registry site received 173 unique visitors, while the tools collection had 44. I kept marketing minimal, only launching Airport Registry on Product Hunt. I’ve been thriving in my day job, spent a lot of time with family, got sick, quickly prototyped two new apps (using AI: v0 and Copilot with Claude are great), fine-tuned some small language models, recorded a podcast, and more. I felt a bit bad about not shipping more after two fun releases, but I also know that I needed this time to take a step back and come back with new ideas.
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