#buildinpublic was what I had been using but noticed as I was typing it in, #buildinginpublic was coming up 1st in my twitter app. (Not sure whether to read anything into that though)
And that just about wraps up this retrospective of how I built a fully functioning review site with both web & mobile apps in a few days without spending a penny.
All that's left to do is show some screenshots, starting with the mobile app:
To hook GraphQL to the same back end spreadsheet, I used the gatsby-source-google-spreadsheets npm package. Once I had plugged in the right env vars and enabled permissions on the Google sheet, this worked right away.
Am I just old and beleaguered, or is the "preferred tech stack" one of the least important and yet still most discussed topics amongst SaaS founders, startups, indiehackers and makers on Twitter?
Glide works with GoogleSheets as a data source, and you can auto-generate web and mobile UIs by pointing to a spreadsheet. Great CRUD capabilities out-of-the-box.
For a no code tool with UI capabilities, I opted for GlideApps. Given I was most likely to be sitting on the sofa sampling while reviewing IPAs, I figured the primary form of input would be a mobile app.
I want to be a little less ignorant of no-code tools that are out in the market. I've used Airtable in the past, but wanted to try something a little different, with more UI capabilities. Tried a couple, nothing fitted well.
With my IPA review site, content can be updated with every new review, so using markdown files is not a practical solution, especially with structured data. Instead, I opted for a datasource that I can update & generate from, for each new review.
So now that I've opted for Gatsby again & my HTML/CSS skills just aren't up to the task, I thought it best to build this out using one of the _many_ free templates available.
I decided to build my IPA review site as a static site as I wanted to explore static site generators a little further (I had ported my freelance company & personal blog sites to static sites using Gatsby).
I opted to build a niche site dedicated to reviewing IPAs. Not my typical SaaS output but this was simply to get me back in the groove. I became interested in IPAs a couple of years ago & had started exploring ales from different local breweries...