2 weeks in - time for a first recap

Looking back, it all started about three or four weeks ago. I had "finished" my previous side project, alc4.me, so my brain started to look for new ideas to work on. As I was already running a Bluesky repost bot and was thinking about starting a new one, I got the idea of creating a little "platform" that would allow me to easily configure such bots and to run them in a more controlled environment than my previous implementation.

The last few weeks I had also started to read along in r/SideProject and r/buildinpublic. So I decided to build a platform that could be used by others as well (aka "SaaS") and to share my progress about it publicly. This post is the first result of the latter.

What has happened so far

The first thing I worked on was the backend, which provides all the required functionalities, such as authentication, user management, bot management, and more. Creating the required APIs was quite easy, as I had done things like this several times. But for the first time, I actually incorporated authorization using the "login with Google functionality". And thanks to this great tutorial by Sakalya Mitra, it was quite easy to achieve.

Of course, all this backend work also included learning about and integrating dynamoDB as the backend database.

Next was the actual bot runner. Again, this was not too hard as I had done similar things before, and I could also reuse parts of the code of my old implementation. The trickiest part here was getting the Bluesky session handling correct so my bots would not get rate-limited again. One of the main reasons I decided to implement my bot handling new from the ground up.

The third step was implementing the frontend. This was by far the most complicated thing, as I usually do not do a lot of frontend development. I started with a basic React solution. Again, because I had seen some React before. But luckily, the one and only @MadeMyDay convinced me to check out Vue as he strongly prefers it over React. And I must say, I do not regret looking into it at all. So, after learning a lot, trying several component libraries, I finally got the first working version of the frontend done.

So, after these first two weeks, I have a frontend that allows me to interact with the system. A backend that stores data and allows interaction with the data. And a scheduler that is running two bots as of now (will share some statistics in one of my next posts).

Next steps

As usual, there are a lot of things to be done. But these are the bigger ones that are on my agenda for now:

• As you could very clearly see in the screenshots, some basic styling of the frontend is required. So I am pretty sure that I will do some more improvements on this side. Tailwind, here I come!

• To have a smooth onboarding journey, I will include some transactional emails. I’ve done first tests but the overall onboarding needs to be defined.

• Share more about the progress and the stack I am using

• Getting in touch with people to get feedback on this project

Questions? Wanna join?

I would be really happy to hear from you. And it does not matter if you have questions, feedback, ideas, or even think the whole thing is not worth it ,-). Any of your feedback is welcome.

Also, if you want to be part of the pre-pre-alpha users, just ping me and we can see what we can do.

You can find me on Bluesky (@fez.world), Reddit (fez_de), or GitHub (fezde).