August 2023: Cleaning Up Projects
Preparing for a New Project
Hello everyone,
Thank you for reading this month’s newsletter. I wrote this issue a few days ago (so this one is exceptionally auto-scheduled).
The main focus of August was to close unfinished projects and reduce the number of projects I have to focus on in the future.
Too many projects
I like to start new projects. I like to bring them to a stand which can be used by anyone. Most of the projects are doing fine without me touching the code base. Most of them cost me barely any money to host or run. Some projects even have paying customers. For some, I was forced to put advertisements. For the others, I only touch them if there are major bugs.
Creating new projects is fun, but not a good long-term strategy if I want to be able to live off them. Therefore, I think it’s a good idea to focus on one or two projects in the long run.
This month, I started to clean up some projects. Most of them are tiny changes, but I am preparing to focus on a single project in the future. Here are all the small changes I made this month.
Changed ArticleToImage.ai slightly
ArticleToImage started as a simple idea: a tool which would give you the image if you give it the text. I started it as an experiment, but never completed the project. While going through all of my project, I thought why not make tiny improvements timeboxed (e.g. 1h) and leave it online.
In the long run, I will come back to this project when I feel it has potential (or if enough people are interested)
Changed Kiru.io design
I changed the design of my website slightly. Once again, I did a timeboxed session of two days to make small changes which would not cost me a lot of time and which would be visible to you.
I added a link to my newsletter issues and added images to all the blog articles. For some, I had to improve and add some fancy AI generated images :)
WhatDinner
I am preparing to finish the WhatDinner app (a meal planner for couples). There are a bunch of bugs, which I should fix before releasing it on the App Store.
I managed to add a search box to the recipe and make them editable. Well not much. I will continue on this project next month. My goal is to have it published by the end of the September.
ColorGuesser Traffic Spike
ColorGuesser was a simple project where you are given the name of a color and have to guess its RGB value. You get a score based on some closeness function. Since I put it online, the traffic has been growing:
This month, it got mentioned by UX DESIGN WEEKLY and has got a huge traffic spike ( I will let you know about the long-term effect next month):
That’s it for this month. Thank you again for reading this far.