Aaron Bronow

I’m starting the year with a new plan. I have two goals:

1. Get back into writing code every day
2. Build an app to post a #PhotoOfTheDay to my socials

They go together because if I only had one goal to write code every day I would get bored and off track. If I only had the other goal to build an app I would procrastinate or pivot too many times and never finish. I know myself! ADHD will get the better of me unless I have a plan and small, achievable goals. So I have to break these 2 main goals into smaller chunks.

What is Windmill?

Windmill.dev is a platform for building automation apps with a web UI. It’s Open Source, has a free tier, and an active developer community. It’s similar to n8n but less opinionated and freer.

How to Write Code Every Day

First off, by every day I mean Monday through Friday. I don’t plan on working every weekend. The weekend is reserved for reflection, recouperation, and recreation.

How am I going to monitor my progress? Since this project is in GitHub I can use the contribution graph to see my results. It’s going to feel real good to have a wall of green squares every week!

To decide what to code every day I’ll need a daily plan. I’m calling this a daily practice outline.

Daily Practice

• Motivation
• 3 things
• Structured notes
• Fellowship

Motivation can be reading or listening to a podcast; something that I don’t have to think too much about in order to get started with my day. An ideal motivation is automatic or just press play. 3 Things is a goal-setting technique where I’ll write down 3 small things I want to do during the next 24 hours. This can be cleaning up a codebase, updating dependencies, or writing some functional component. They don’t have to be related to each other. As I go through this practice the things should snowball into bigger accomplishments. But it’s OK to have easy wins! Structured Notes means writing down my daily progress in Notion and keeping links for context. I’ll use these notes for reminding myself what I did already and working on future blog posts. Fellowship is critical for me to stay on track with any project. Since I’m not working in a team I’ll need friends I can chat with about my project. Sometimes I get stuck on a technical decision like how to structure a component or what dependency to use when there are lots of choices that all seem reasonable. Having someone who is also programming regularly to talk to can unblock me even if they don’t work on the same project. They can be IRL friends or community on Discord or GitHub.

How to Build a Photo Posting App

The product of all this effort should be something usable, at least to me. I have a routine established of posting a photo (sometimes more than one) every day on my social media. I have accounts on Instagram, Threads, Facebook, Bluesky, and TicTok. I want to be able to schedule a post and see it in a queue until a set time when it goes live. I also want to queue up multiple days worth of posts. I’m copying the functionality of something like Buffer. I decided on using Windmill.dev for the platform and it has basic web-based UI so I don’t have to build a mobile native app right away. Here’s my business goal:

Build a tool for posting daily photos to social media. It should be cost effective (as cheap as possible), always available in a browser or app, should allow queuing posts and posting to multiple accounts every day. Posts should include the photo and a short description. The queue could post at the same time every day or be set when the post is drafted. It should be hosted and publicly accessible from anywhere on phone browser. The runners should be hosted and able to run any time.

I’m a fan of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery so there should always be a working dev build. Daily changes might not be much to look at but at the end of every week I want to make a blog post summarizing what I accomplished and what the product looks like. So the daily 3 Things should accumulate to a feature being available every week. At the end of the month I’ll record a demo. The app doesn’t need to be production ready at the end of the month but I want to get into the habit of polishing the build for a set demo.

Kicking off Week 1

This has been a summary of my plan for the next 4 weeks. In the first week my goals include wiring up the Meta API to a Windmill app and posting a photo with description to my Instagram and Threads (Facebook post is a stretch goal).

I’ll check back in 1 week!