Wrapped: Side Project Weekend, and Lifelog 2024
jasonleow • 6 Jan 2024 •
Seeing my post on Time Hop about getting back to building features for Lifelog in January 2023 after a long hiatus, I realised I forgot to wrap up my Side Project Weekend thing for last year.
What a year of building! I went from not building anything for more than 1 year from 2021, to shipping 30 new features in 2023:
- Jan - Hover markdown preview
- Feb - Markdown preview using ‘esc’ hot key
- Mar - Decided to start Side Project Weekends, to set aside time to build Lifelog on weekends
- Apr - Toggle button for markdown preview
- May -
- Typing sounds
- Goal reminders as placeholder text in /write page
- Saving status toast notification
- Scheduled database backups
- Updated Heroku stack
- Jun -
- Screenshot post 💎
- Free tool side side project - What To Write writing prompts randomizer tool
- Daily reminders prototype (but no takers)
- Recap on Side Project Weekends - 9 features in 3 months!
- Jul -
- Rich text editor 💎💎
- Toggle switch between markdown vs rich text editor
- Image upload
- Aug -
- Manual emails to notify of incoming payment for trial users
- Image upload for rich text editor
- Download archive in JSON
- Download archive to Google Sheets
- Time hop - “Last year today…” 💎💎💎
- Markdown render for announcement banner
- Sep -
- Archive to Wayback Machine
- Fancy checkbox to goals list
- Time hop “One month ago…” 💎
- Rain and forest sounds
- Profile badge and celebration modal with confetti for 1000 day club
- Celebration modals for 365, 100, 30, 7 day streak milestones
- Browser-based spellcheck
- Oct -
- Time hop - “X number of months ago…”
- Cloudflare WAF rules to block malicious bots
- Nov -
- Worked on Related Posts but didn’t deploy anything as was super busy with Black Friday
- Dec -
- Discover More (aka Related Posts)
- Lifelog Wrapped 💎💎
(And not forgetting lots of fixes to UX and functionality too, in between all the new features…)
WOW THIRTY NEW FEATURES! THREE-ZERO!! 🤯
And all that from just working on weekend mornings for a few hours, or even just an hour or so on occasional busy weekends. So I’m just gonna say it:
I’m f**cking proud. I truly am.
And it’s not really just about being productive and shipping lots of features.
I’m enjoying it more and more as I build this passion side project, joyfully and mindfully, indulging in my craft vs worrying about commerce. Falling in love with coding again.
Now that to me, is the real source of my pride in this.
What’s next for Lifelog in 2024?
I don’t know. I truly don’t.
The pact I made with myself when I switched Lifelog to side project status is that I wouldn’t try to over-think it, or be over-ambitious.
If the past year was any indication, it shows that I can be pretty productive and build interesting useful features even if I didn’t have a roadmap or set goals. Maybe as a business it’s not growing. But that’s okay. That’s why it’s a passion side project.
Ultimately, I keep circling back to what this passion project had always been for me at its core:
A love for writing.
A love for coding software.
A love for creating, for making products.
A love for living a reflective, thoughtful life.
A love for the friends I’ve journeyed alongside here.
So cheers to spending more time on what I love for Lifelog in 2024! 🍻
And to @everyone here, I’m so grateful for all the support, and for sticking around. I’m thankful beyond measure.
Comments
Outstanding Jason! This shows the power of reflection and reviews. One can easily downplay achievements and progress and without this exercise you’ve done on this post, all the work and effort would have gone by quietly.
@therealbrandonwilson Sure, will prioritize that! The auto popup to find a username might take longer, but detecting @mentions and sending a notification should be easier.
@drodol Yeah I would have never known if I didn’t take the time to write this down. Not gonna lie, it does take time and effort to pull up the past posts and extracting the info. Maybe that’s why most don’t do this. But so worth it 💪
That’s a fair point, Jason. Maybe building up a practice where one keeps an changelog (or consulting Github itself!) could be a way to do it.
Bravo! It’s amazing to see the volume of tasks when you list them. Regarding what’s next, perhaps we should take a look at the roadmap. The one that comes to mind is notifications for @mentions in the body of posts. That was definitely the feature that encouraged more community interaction on 200WAD.