[BAWD #121] Lessons from 7+ Years of Indie Hacking

Mar 19, 2024

Hello 👋🏾,

I trust you had a blissful past few days and are keen for the week ahead. If you’re not, please keep pushing and don’t give up; you’ve got this and I’m rooting for you Btw, here’s a friendly reminder for you to sow an act to reap a habit and sow a habit to reap a character.

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Nerd Memes of the Week 🥲

Featured Technical Articles ✍🏾👩🏽‍💻

Tech stack lessons from my 7+ year indie dev journey by Takuya Matsuyama.
How to Build an Audio Chatbot with Nextjs, OpenAI, and ElevenLabs by Bolaji Ayodeji.
How I Keep Myself Alive using Golang by Matt Boyle.
Event Interception by Ian Cartwright, Rob Horn, and James Lewis.
Exploring The Math of Thresholds by Emmanuel Bakare.
FLAME for JavaScript: Rethinking Serverless by Annie Sexton.
Build a Nuxt app with Azure serverless REST API by Maya Shavin.
The Python Paradox by Paul Graham.
Building an Investor List App with Novu and Supabase by Prosper Otemuyiwa.
How to Create an Automated Profile README using Nodejs and GitHub Actions by Bolaji Ayodeji.
Exploring Next.js Forms with Server Actions by Robin Wieruch.
The TSConfig Cheat Sheet by Matt Pocock.
Just write by Sara Soueidan.

Featured Productivity Articles ✍🏾🦅

How to Create a Chain Reaction of Good Habits by James Clear.
The Leap by Seth Godin.
When to Say “Yes” and How to Say “No” by Mike Manson.
The Omnipresence of Work by Lawrence Yeo.

Product of the Week ✨

Stashpad is a fast and instant collaborative alternative to Google Docs that allows you to write directly in Markdown + other cool stuff.

Good Tidings 🔊

Last week the software engineering ecosystem was aroused with the launch of Devin, the AI software engineer. Devin is an autonomous agent that can solve engineering tasks using its own shell, code editor, and web browser just like a human engineer would. While this is limited now, in some time, Devin will perfectly finish the tasks of an engineer. So yes, it’s scary. Just like Tejas rightly mentioned in his new podcast, AI won’t take your job but AI + some other things will take some jobs. But be rest assured that AI won’t render you completely redundant if you don’t stay stagnant. We all must keep utilizing the key components that make humans unique and get ready to maximize the use of AI tools to enhance our work.
Contributor applications are now open for Google Summer of Code 2024 from now until 2nd April at 18:00 (UTC). Now is your time to finish up your application or get started! There are 195+ organizations this year.
You should check out TypeHero, a community of TypeScript developers where you can elevate your TS skills through interactive coding challenges, discussions, and knowledge-sharing.
Labeling comments encourages collaboration and saves hours of misunderstanding. Here’s a great comments convention with different labels you can adopt personally and even in your team for different review types.
You should check out this tool to elevate your job hunt with AI-tailored resumes and cover letters you can personalize for different applications.
You should also take a look at the Made In Nigeria project to explore the curation of awesome OSS projects built by Nigerians. Spoiler: it just got a cool makeover :).
I built an audio chatbot (more like chatting with Siri) you can play around with if you want (PS: you will need your own OpenAI and ElevenLabs API key—it’s easy to get one if you don’t have one already :)).
The creator of FastAPI just launched a full-stack modern web application template that supports FastAPI, React, SQLModel, PostgreSQL, Docker, GitHub Actions, automatic HTTPS, and more. You should check it out!
Tomasz joined a new ML company and embarked on a homemade AI boot camp to get up to speed. Here's a thread with all the AI resources used.
I would end today’s good tidings with this beautiful quote by Seth, “Learning is about becoming incompetent on our way to getting better. If you’re not open to the tension that is caused by knowing you could do better, it’s unlikely you’re willing to do the work to get better. As you’re doing that work, there’s the satisfaction it brings, but also the knowledge that just a moment ago, you weren’t any good.”

Lists and Collections 🗂️

You can take over 2,500 MIT courses from various fields online for free through MIT OpenCourseWare.
Here’s a curated list of project-based programming tutorials you can use to learn how to build applications from scratch.
Here’s a complete computer science study plan you can use to become a software engineer.
Here is a collection of universities, companies, and organizations that offer free online courses with certificates.
Here’s a collection of the best promotional deals for developers to level up your skills, workspace gadgets, etc.
If you’re looking to get started with technical writing, you should check this for a curated list of articles, books, videos, tools, podcasts, etc.
For managers, here’s a collection of engineering leadership resources that you’d find helpful.
Are you looking to network with other student community leaders and professionals or level up your skills and give back to your community? You can join the GitHub Campus Experts program now and expand your connections!
Here's a recommendation of the top websites to find remote jobs for different software engineering and product fields in tech.
Here’s a curated list of interview questions for different programming languages, frameworks, and technologies.

Book Recommendations 📚

All of Grace by Charles Spurgeon.
Fluent React by Tejas Kumar.
Developer Experience (DX) by Addy Osmani.
Engineering Management for the Rest of Us by Sarah Drasner.
Building Python Web APIs with FastAPI by Abdulazeez Adeshina.

Featured Tweets and Videos 😍

Here are some cool tweets and my favorite videos from YouTube these past weeks.

⬇️: Build a Chatbot with Nextjs, OpenAI, and ElevenLabs

⬇️: React Crash Course 2024

⬇️: Catch Up on Today's Web: AI, CSS, JavaScript and HTML

⬇️: Build a viral event sharing page

⬇️: OSCA x Google Summer of Code 2024 Webinar

Quote of the Week 💙

“Existing and imperfect is better than perfect but imaginary.” —Jason Lengstorf.

Sponsors and Patrons 💫

Shout out to my amazing supporters: Maya Shavin, Angie Jones, and Obinna Odirionye. Their support enables me to keep writing, teaching, curating resources, and supporting others. Thank you!

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Bolaji Ayodeji's Weekly Digest