Morning routine, and my indie hacker checklist
Morning Routine
After quitting my job, I started looking into optimizing my day for maximum productivity. The morning routine that I follow is essentially “no morning routine”.
The first thing I do after waking up is dive into focused work for 2-3 hours straight, tackling the most important task for the day. I call this “morning work”—even though it doesn’t always happen in the morning, depending on when I wake up.
I plan my morning work the night before, so I can jump right into it without wasting any time. Today, I’m writing this Substack issue as my morning work.
After the morning work, I start my morning routine. I’ll do a 30-minute workout, shower, breakfast (brunch?), and try to relax for a while. Then I grab a coffee and get back to work.
My Indie Hacker Checklist
As a solopreneur, it’s challenging to keep track of projects and make progress consistently. There’s so much to do and it’s easy to switch between projects without finishing any.
I decided to concentrate on a few key projects for the next 6 months. So these are my main “small bets” for the next 6 months (tweet):
The important thing here is that I’m not outcome-oriented with these goals. I want to put in my best quality work, but the outcome isn’t my primary focus.
The number of Substack subscribers doesn’t matter.
The goal is to write and self-publish a book, the number of sales doesn’t matter.
And the number of stars on my GitHub doesn’t matter.
These projects are designed to provide valuable learnings, regardless of their commercial success.
Project Update: Kal
I’m working on Kal as my project for Buildspace S5. Buildspace is a 6-week program where you take your own project idea to completion while providing regular weekly updates.
Kal is an open-source, self-hosted serverless CLI-based email newsletter app.
I switched from craftpr to Kal—an old stashed project—for Buildspace, at the last minute.
This week I worked on:
Improving the CLI aesthetics using Charm.sh.
Supporting filters to send emails to a subset of subscribers
Scheduling emails using natural language
This Week’s Recommendations
What’s hidden behind “just implementation details” by Nicole Tietz
Nicole talks about how it’s easy to underestimate other people’s work without seeing the complexity under the hood.
Systems programmers often say web dev is easy or “just CRUD”
Backend developers like to think that Frontend is straightforward and easy.
There’s beauty in each role. So the next time you get the feeling “huh, that’s such an easy role”, try to get your hands dirty and see for yourself.
Optimizing SQLite for servers by Sylvain Kerkour
SQLite is my favorite database. It’s lightweight, easy to set up, and powerful. If you want to get up and running with a database quickly, SQLite should be your first pick.
Sylvain does a great job describing how to squeeze the most out of SQLite by fine-tuning the database configuration. He also talks about sharding, automatic backups using Litestream, zero-downtime updates, pitfalls, and using SQLite in a distributed setup (with read replicas).
BTW, both Nicole and Sylvain have awesome blogs (and newsletters), check them out!
Thanks for reading this issue! Feel free to reach out to me with questions or feedback.
See you next Friday,
Tanay.