Alexander Perez 🦖 zero to one with your startup

Rapid application development specialist | Typescript, React, Next.js, State Management, SQL/NoSQL, GraphQL, OAuth

Published on June 5, 2024

Update, September 1st, 2024:

Blake is in open Beta at 👉️ https://getblake.link

If you'd like to share thoughts and suggestions, make sure to leave me a comment here or on any of my posts and I'll chat about it with you :)

For the past two weeks, I have been building a SaaS: Blake - the bookmark sharing assistant. It's a bookmark management tool that helps obsessive collectors of internet URLs, like myself, organize and share their collections into lists. It's in-progress, but the MVP will be available soon in the next week.

Here's a quick sneak peek:

There is so much more to come. Including color.

As they say, the devil is in the details: I'm actually building Blake to showcase the skills I've built as a Senior Full-stack Engineer over the last 12 years.

In that time, I have worked for a number of different companies and startups, all of which have products behind paid subscriptions or internal systems (or have gone under). To a developer like myself who is looking for a job today, that has become a roadblock. People need to see that I have the "skills to pay the bills," as they say. Not one to lack the will to try, I've gone ahead and opened my editor and browser and gone to work.

Modern Web Engineering in 2024

While it's still a Work-in-Progress, Blake is being built on a tech stack that reflects a fast, feature-rich, mobile-first, and responsive web application.

The stack includes:

• Next.js - Quickly build for the frontend and backend using the best of Node.js and React.js, with server-side rendering and reactive state management.
• PostgreSQL - Highly scalable and performant data storage that can run anywhere.
• Drizzle ORM - Fully Typescript-typed database schemas and querying, without a special configuration language.
• TailwindCSS - Industry-standard styles and theming, built for a mobile-first, without the runtime overhead.
• Vercel - Cloud application hosting trusted by Adobe, Meta, Nintendo, and Zapier.

These come together to make development a relatively pain-free experience and ensure that the people using it experience minimal lag and frustration.

User Experience Design

When building apps, frustration is the killer for the longevity of any app. If you've worked at any kind of company that builds software, you know what it's like to field complaints through customer support and carry the weight of negative feedback from clients and users. Good design isn't instantaneous, but good design from the start is a strategy to maximize delight for you and the ones using what you've built.

Initial exploration on key needs for Blake. It should be as easy to use on mobile as it is on desktop.

To make sure the experience for Blake is as tight and aggravation-free as possible, it was decided to focus on one main feature: organizing bookmarks into lists, from the Chrome browser, with a responsive user interface.

What's Next

Update, September 1st, 2024:

Blake is in open Beta at 👉️ https://getblake.link

If you'd like to share thoughts and suggestions, make sure to leave me a comment here or on any of my posts and I'll chat about it with you :)

I'll be posting updates to Blake here, and they will range from more to less technical. Stay tuned for:

• UI/UX Considerations
• Feature Updates
• Technical Challenges

Read the full article on LinkedIn: Click here to read, and leave a comment, please :)