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Trialing Something different. Daily developer notes, with a semver title, not sure if I’m subconsciously bringing that out from someone else doing it, or if it’s an original idea. Either way, it seems fun. Obviously it’s zero indexed, I.e year 1 is actually 0. Let’s see how far we get.

Setting the Scene

I’ve been a developer, for over a decade, with about 8 years as a FullStack Developer. Focusing primarily with Nodejs, JavaScript, Typescript. Picking up Python, Dart, SQL (if it counts as a language - No shade), Perl to what I’d consider to a level of fluency along the way. Dabbling with another handful of languages like Go, and C#, Java, Ruby for various tasks or projects I’ve been involved with.

November 2025, my wife and I welcomed our first child into the world, and after 7 weeks of trial by fire I found out how desperate I am to be around at home as much as possible.

The Idea

Every developer gets stuck in the endless cycle of side projects, side projects that’ll make it big! Build it, with the perfect stack all the best practices and full featured only to drop the development a short while in - I’m no exception, countless side projects that I’m going to monetise only to get bored and move on to the next shiny thing, or rip out huge features nobody asked for to rewrite it with a sick new framework or library. This time I need it to be different though, it has to stick and I have to ship it. I actually have something to lose if I don’t.

The idea I have is quite niche from what I can tell, and unfortunately for anyone actually reading this, I won’t fully diverge the full idea until it’s more developed, for now I’ll just say it’s in the telecommunications industry. Competition exists and I am looking to see how to compete with the established brands, considering I don’t want to “disrupt” the space or even dominate - just have my fair share of the market. But the overall delivery of my idea is via Mobile application which I’m in the process of building out.

The secret-ness of my idea at the moment doesn’t stop me from discussing my tech stack, backend processes and so on so there is still much that can be shared. So try to stick around, and see what else I have in store.

Typical Tech Stack

So I’m basically always developing for serverless first. I hate configuring servers, managing docker compose files, docker swarm. Kubernetes This whole, "A VPS for $5 a month" culture irks me because they don't actually talk about the time (therefore cost) of managing that $5 hunk of (virtual) metal. At any stage of a developers journey if you're releasing code or products your time is worth more than the time spent trying to get that $5 VPS production ready, and maintained throughout it's lifetime.

Anyway rant over - Serverless first mindset, I usually deploy to AWS, and to be honest I barely log into the AWS console. I develop using the SST Framework the same guys who created the fabulous OpenCode. Regrettably SST has taken a bit of a back seat in terms of support from the team, but it is mature enough and so far continues to suit my needs completely.

On the Front-end for the web I'll use whatever, I LOVE Astro, and try to use it whenever I can. With a bit of React sprinkled in. For the mobile side, I'm a bit of a Flutter fanboy. I've worked professionally with React Native, and hobby projects with Flutter, I still choose Flutter every time over React Native. The resulting application just feels so much more polished.

Personally I try to avoid anything Vercel branded, so I do loathe NextJS but sometimes I do just have to bite the bullet - At the very least, will host it through OpenNext on AWS.

A rogue entry to the tech stack, recently I've been implementing a new library I stumbled upon a while back - ArriRPC, which is a code first remote procedure call framework.

Arri RPC is a code-first RPC framework. Type-safe clients get generated directly from your server code meaning you never need to manually write another client again.

This means, since my backends are always in Typescript, I can host an ArriRPC server in a lambda on AWS, and build out my API's which in turn get a fully featured Dart client generated for me. This cross language development flow has been thoroughly enjoyable, and I think ArriRPC is a very unknown and underrated library.

Closing Thoughts

I never really know how to end these things, and I think I just waffled about some semi related points for a few minutes (Took a couple hours to actually write), either way. Lets catch the next post, and see what I put down onto a page, and what I achieve between now and whenever the post lands.

Thanks.