Dev Journal: First Few Weeks
I’ve been building a social media planning tool and wondering whether my direction actually makes sense. In this post, I'll share some of my current progress and thoughts on the project.
For the past few weeks, I've been busy building a social media planning tool. While working on it, I often ask myself if what I'm doing actually makes sense.
So, in this post, I'll share what I'm working on and why. The process of writing things down often helps me gain clarity. Perhaps it will help me structure the loose thoughts that have been on my mind recently.
What's the idea?
Posting on social media offers a lot of upside: it can help generate leads, enable valuable connections, create career opportunities, and more. At the same time, many people (myself included) struggle to share their thoughts online. For me, the biggest blocker is the fear of judgment. It manifests itsself through a gut-wrenching feeling before hitting publish.
Against this background, I want to scratch my own itch and build something that helps people like me grow organically across social media. I see organic growth as a combination of more followers and higher engagement. To achieve this, there are really only two things you can do: produce more engaging content, and distributing it more effectively. The product that I'm working on aims to help on both fronts.
How's the progress?
The progress is okay-ish. Before building anything, I created Figma mockups to get a sense for how I want the product to look and feel. The image in the example screen tab below shows the compose screen which is going to be the main screen.
After finishing the designs, I built out some of the core functionality, including:
- A sidebar that lets you switch between draft, scheduled, and published posts.
- The synchronization feature that harmonizes the content across different social media platforms.
- A basic implementation of the social media API integrations for Mastodon, LinkedIn, and Bluesky that let you post.
- Cloudflare image and video uploads that let you add media to the posts.
What's the next step?
My goal for the next few weeks is to build it out to a state where I can start using it myself. This will really help because while using it, I'll find things to refine and polish.
Over the coming weeks, I’ll have more time to devote to this project, and I’m eager to see how it develops.
