I launched my first product - and it's horrible

kobyconrad

kobyconrad

Posted on August 7, 2020

I launched my first product - and it's horrible

After programming for about 6 months I launched what I considered to be my first "real" product, Stop Job Hunting. It's a resume builder that is based off a place I used to work.

(Only ever meant to be a demo product please don't sue me.)

I'm proud of two things.

  • It actually works. You can go through, build a resume, and it spits out a PDF.
  • I learned a ton of new technical concepts by building it.

After spending well over a hundred hours and thousands of lines of code, I finally launched it into the world, and the world quickly told me about all of the bugs.

I decided I wanted to push forwards with other projects, and that I had succeeded by launching my MVP.

Before I laid it to rest however, I wanted to just write down some of the interesting technical parts of this project.

React, Node, Express

The client is built entirely in React, with the backend in Node & Express. I have been programming in React since almost day 1, but I built a server for the first time maybe a month before this project.

MongoDB + Mongoose

The database itself was built using MongoDB + Mongoose, both services that I had never used before.

Custom Auth System

I was very tempted to use 0Auth or another service to handle the authentication for me, but I ended up building it from scratch myself.

Hack My Resume

This project pivoted around an NPM library called Hack My Resume which takes a json string and can turn it into a resume.

Vercel + Heroku

The client is hosted on Vercel and the server is hosted on Heroku. I had used Vercel to host most of my projects because I had never really used a server before - it was my first time using Heroku.

Docker Containers

Another thing I realized I had never done before, is use an NPM library that wasn't "saved" in the local project, but on the computer. This meant that when I tried to push my project to production that Hack My Resume wouldn't actually work.

To fix this I used Docker Containers to hold my server, which I was then able to install Hack My Resume onto.

...

If for whatever reason you are sadistic enough to look at the code you can check it out below.

Server => https://github.com/Stop-Job-Hunting/dev-server
Client => https://github.com/Stop-Job-Hunting/dev-client

Cheers :)

šŸ’– šŸ’Ŗ šŸ™… šŸš©
kobyconrad
kobyconrad

Posted on August 7, 2020

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