Wearing all the hats

Lessons learned on a semi-sabatical time after many years working for others

genar

Nov 25, 2025

February 2024, the first Local First conf (no pun intended) is happening in Berlin. As a local-first (previously offline-first) enthusiast, I’m thrilled to attend this conference with some friends.

The talk that left a mark on me was the one given by Maggie Appleton, Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot developers.

The plan

So, after quitting my job in mid-March, I decided to try to be an Indie Developer and apply the “Barefoot developers” idea as much as possible. Spoiler, it ends up being harder than expected because “distribution is key”. That said, I just wanted to have fun by doing what I liked the most. Create software that can help someone (or just me, that’s also fine :P).

The challenge definition was quite simple (and vague). Take a year to create (at least) 6 apps. The way to get productive would be to use AI as much as possible for the execution and plan. That would be the perfect excuse to “learn” to use these trendy tools to super-power me.

Initially when I decided to start this journey, 6 different apps, with unscooped size, seemed a reasonable amount to achieve in a year. That should give like 2 months per app. Understanding that some of them would take more, and some others less. In my plans, I was considering using hackathons to boost push me even more, so I participated in 3!

Local first

I've also wanted to experiment a bit more with local first technologies. So I experimented with as many frameworks as possible in my old deplayer.app project. In some of the initial projects were super productive using tinybase + Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects for the realtime. But soon I have found the limitations of choosing it for some projects so I had to find my next tool-of-choice.
So, I finally put all the eggs in convex.dev (despite not being local-first) because it gave me much more complete and efficient framework to create rich apps with little infra and effort.

The results

I've created many apps such as the following ones and a couple more that I keep in private. Each one would deserve an specific article of what I’ve learnt.

By building so many different apps my learning pace has been accelerated a lot! Specially around AI, tools, patterns, prompt engineering, Local LLM Models, AI agentic programming, and sometimes vibe-coded a lot! which enabled me to explore many paths that I couldn’t even imagine before.
Trying crazy mixes of frameworks, architectures, languages and whatnot as if I were a mad scientist brewing a magical potion.

The reality is that I'm far to make money with any of them, for a very simple reason. I'm not optimizing for it. I'm learning and creating software that I enjoy creating, following the passion and inspiration. Rather than optimizing for money. That said, now I started to go deeper into marketing and how to, at least, be able to get some users that put pressure.

What I want to hightlight in this article is that doing this Indie Developer path forced me out of the safe bubble. I had to think as a Product Owner, a Growth Hacker, a CFO, a Designed, etc.. Owning the E2E of the product requires having to cover many zones that you’re not used to.

Distribution is key

So I’m learning SEO and Marketing as I’m writing this, so I can try to get some traffic to some of my apps. I’m learning to wear the Growth Hacker hat. Despite not being very passionate about the topic itself.

My Achilles heel?

I have many! But there are two very evident. The first one you probably figured out by reading the apps names. I’m terrible finding good names and narratives behind the apps I create. Second one? Logos, I have not much idea on how to get a good logo. I’ve tried many AI tools, and tried to create one myself without getting one that convinces me a lot in almost all apps. In this regard, I created inspire.sunflare.app, so I can collect all UI design or general design references to get inspiration from or generate a prompt to quickly validate ideas.