Launching ngnr.club

Yesterday, October 6th marked the official launch of my new micro SaaS project: ngnr.club. I didn’t write a celeberatory post after I released pwtk.us, so I thought I would take the time now.

It feels profoundly relieving to actually have the project in production as I had spent the better part of the last 3 months polishing it, writing tests, iterating and re-iterating on design etc … I even allowed my CKAD/ CKA certifications studies to take a back seat. Now that it’s out there in the wild web, a lot of mental bandwidth just freed up in my brain.

If I had chosen to write the API in python or node.js, I would’ve been 10x more productive, but it would’ve felt like a drag, doing the same thing I’d been doing for the last 5 years or so. I’m glad I chose to stick with go again, because I was able to solidify my knowledge in the language, I feel like it’s finally “clicking”.

Developing ngnr.club was also a great opportunity to learn how to use Mailchimp for newsletter sign-ups, sendgrid for email notification / account verification, database backups and of course file upload with amazon s3.

I have to confess that it wasn’t always sunshine and rainbows. As I was getting closer to completion, the tasks started to feel like a drag, and I’d thought about giving up many times, but thankfully I didn’t. I couldn’t really do it. I had to see it through, maybe this is the start of something epic who knows ?

In hindsight, I probably (definitely) shouldn’t have implemented user authentication myself and should’ve gone for something like Auth0 instead, for the ease of use and the relatively generous free tier.

But really, the biggest mistake I made was to jump in head first into the code without having designed the product first. This lead to so many wasted hours re-iterating on design which pushed back the original launch to a couple of weeks. Funny enough I did the redesign during the morning hours while I was in rotterdam, before heading out into the city.

I still have a lot of tiny bugs to fix, and cool features I want to implement but I just had to release it. Now I can go back to studying for the CKAD / CKA while doing acquisition / bugfixes on my downtime.

I’ll end with a quote:

“The perfect moment doesn’t exist. If you’re ready, it means you’re late.”

Take care, stay consistent and keep coding.

Karim, aka 0xfishr