Build side project as a full time Software Engineer
Hello everyone, on this post I just want to share about my experience from my perspective about how I working on my side project as a full time software engineer. As a full time software engineer I almost spent half day to work on my job, even up to midnight if there is overtime. So I didn’t have any thoughts about making a product or anything like that. So here my little story how I work on my side project as a full time software engineer.
Pre-development
My daily work is usually around 50% for coding, around 40% I’m working with command line or terminal for git, docker, ssh, install package, etc., and the rest is for the other activities such as meeting and so on.
Some tasks are particular that it’s need to be done by command line or terminal. For example, I need to dump database on MySql that running on docker container so I need to run this command.
docker exec mydb /usr/bin/mysqldump -u root --password=root mydb > dump.sql Not rare either I forgot the command, didn’t know what command should to be run and doing some repetitive commands. Of course it’s very boring and less productive if for example I need the command `X` and I don’t know it, so I have to browse the internet to find out and then just go back to my terminal and execute the command. So, I got an idea to make a cli tools that able to simplifies the less productive process by translate natural language into ready to run executable command. I decide to work on it as my side project and as one of my product.
Development
The development step is such a challenging since I don’t have much time after do my daily work, I also didn’t sleep for about 2 or 3 days because I’m too excited to made it.
I’m doing all development from creating the cli-tools, setup server and deployment also make a landing page by myself, so it’s a fully challenge for me also to do the landing page since I’m specialized in backend and I only have a little bit of frontend knowledge and the result was I’m suck at frontend 😅. I give up and decide to find a free template and use it as the landing page. Template still need some adjustment and I try it by myself and the result was I asked my frontend dev friend to help since my adjustment is messed up 😅, thanks to Rizki Pratama Turbina for the help.
Post-development
I have create a command lines tools as my side project, it’s called AiTerm. It’s a command line tools that designed to assist developers and command-line users by simplifies the process of converting natural language into executable commands.
As a product it will certainly find users, but unfortunately I don’t have any marketing skills. So I just try to learn by read some forum or discussion about how to launch a product and how to find users. But it is not as easy as imagined, I have done some things to find users and the result was I got my first 10 users:
- Ask friends to use it and give feedbacks
- Launched on several well-known platforms such as ProductHunt and SaasHub
- Post it on social Linkedin and Medium
I think that all that I can share about my story creating my side project, thank you for your interest to read untill here. If you are interested on AiTerm you can visit https://aiterm.net and give it a try, your feedbacks are invaluable for me to improve AiTerm to be much better. Let me know if you facing any problem for using AiTerm. Please feel free to leave comments for any discussion or suggestion. Share this post if you find this post is useful. See ya…
🔥🔥🔥 Excited to reach the first 100 users
https://www.aiterm.net/
https://www.producthunt.com/products/aiterm-beta
https://medium.com/@awangt/my-first-product-i-made-using-go-eb0f748262b3