Blind Saturday, blind dating app

tldr

I launched a blind dating app which didn’t take off. Learning Rails and writing Python made me appreciate the frontend ecosystem a lot more.

Launch

I launched a blind dating app on Reddit. Turns out people don’t want to go blind dates - especially women. But I got great feedback on my post so I’m super happy.

I keep making the same mistake of launching something without figuring out if the product even solves a problem or not. I flat out assumed that people want to go on blind dates and didn’t even validate this assumption before building the app.

When I first got the idea, I thought that this is going to be the next big thing and thought I should make this in Rails after reading it’s praises.

I didn’t know Rails so I started learning it.

Thoughts on Ruby on Rails

• Ruby syntax is beautiful
• Rails does too much magic to get started
• Implementing authentication in Rails is trivial
• Deploying a Rails app sucks
• Fly.io is terrible

I got frustrated with the Rails experience and began building the app using tools I already knew: Supabase and Next.js. I was able to get all the basic functionality working within 2 hours.

I love MDN

I am so happy with the current JavaScript ecosystem. The fact that anyone can build out an idea they have for free, in a matter of hours is something to be grateful for. Really, the quality of tools in the frontend space is top-notch.

I have been writing Python at work for the past 2 weeks. It has made me appreciate MDN so much. MDN contributors deserve a ton of credit for providing such a wonderful resource for developers.

This was the second marketplace app that I made, the first one being Visits. I don’t know what my next project will be, but it won’t be a marketplace app.