Feb 7, 2021

Why Side Project Time is Never Wasted

Ian Wootten

Hello there. Welcome to my very first issue of “Shipping Stuff”. You’re one of the very first in my own little exclusive club and I’m really glad to have you with me.

This is going to be a look back over some of the stories and code that I’ve enjoyed over the last little while. I’m being fairly non-committal about the frequency of issues, but I’m aiming for every other week. If you have any comments or link suggestions, feel free to respond to get in touch with me. For now, grab a cuppa, pull up a pew and enjoy!

3 Stories from 3 Bears

The Tools I Use for The Bannerbear SaaS Marketing Site

Bannerbear is a tool for auto generating images. The founder Jon, has long been pushing out solo projects for ages. He’s had much success with Bannerbear and this post details exactly how he is able to execute so quickly.

www.bannerbear.com

Why I Didn't Open-Source My Second SaaS

Many of the founders points here really resonate with me after coming to the conclusion that open source generally isn’t good business for a solo founder.

panelbear.com

My product is my garden

Less speed, more snails. An interesting analogy on how a founder treats their products by gently nurturing them. A stark contrast to the usual VC backed stories.

herman.bearblog.dev

Code

Streaming S3 replication for SQLite.

Backup your SQLite database to S3 with this streaming replication tool that will run as a background process.

github.com

DigitalOcean API Slugs

I always struggle with remembering the correct image name to use when creating servers with DigitalOcean. Turns out there’s a website exactly for that!

slugs.do-api.dev

There was a lot of controversy recently when Elasticsearch changed their license type and AWS choosing to fork the project. This video from fireship gives a really good insight behind what went down and how open source works more generally.