Stack choices, small projects, and shipping checklists for solo learners
The demo is down, and the only notes are in a chat you closed. You can’t remember if your API server runs on Fly.io or Render, your SSH keys are stored in a folder you haven’t opened in 6 months, and the user who flagged the outage is a recruiter testing your work as part … Read more
The schema change is one command, and the only copy of the data is that same file. Run a bad ALTER TABLE statement that drops a column or munges date formats, and you can roll back only if you have a valid, uncorrupted copy of the file taken right before you ran the migration. For … Read more
The tag is v0.3.0, and CHANGELOG still ends at last month’s guess. You just ran git tag to mark the release you deployed to production 10 minutes ago, but you’re staring at a 4-week-old changelog entry for v0.2.9 that doesn’t mention any of the 17 commits you merged since then. Skipping this sync step now … Read more
The live tab is open, and you still do not know which three clicks tell the story. Most new solo developers waste the first 2 minutes of portfolio demos clicking through irrelevant code files, explaining their tech stack before showing value, or fumbling through nested navigation to find the core feature. This script cuts all … Read more
Last month’s bug is back, and the log only says something failed. You scroll back 2 hours of logs looking for context, but all you see are vague entries that don’t connect to the user who reported the issue, the action they took, or the data that triggered the crash. You wrote those logs last … Read more
It is Friday 6 p.m., and the only release artifact is a folder named final2. You pulled the last 3 bug fixes and 1 small feature for the week, skipped the full CI run because you thought the changes were too tiny to break anything, and you’re 12 minutes away from closing your laptop to … Read more
Three half-fixes are in your head, and the editor has twelve unsaved buffers. You can’t remember if the API route for user profiles was supposed to accept POST requests or only PATCH, and you’re 20 minutes deep into debugging a CSS layout bug that you didn’t write down before you switched to answering a quick … Read more
The token is in a screenshot, and the repo is about to go public. That Stripe API key you pasted for a 10-second test last week, or the Firebase service account token you copied into a comment to debug a CORS error, will be scraped by automated bots within 15 minutes of your repo going … Read more