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 I'm heading in the right direction. So, in this post, I'll share what project I'm working on and share my thoughts on why I'm working on it.
What's the idea?
Posting on social media offers a lot of upside: it can generate leads, foster valuable connections, create career opportunities, and more. At the same time, many people (including myself) struggle with it. For me, fear of judgment and not knowing what to post often get in the way.
Against this backdrop, 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. And 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 the content creation and distribution fronts. I want something that lets me distribute my content across multiple platforms and helps me write good, engaging content.
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.
