How makers stay productive

I have been a software engineer by trade for almost a decade now. I always wanted to productize my skills in a package that is appealing to startups and companies. Until last week where I took it seriously and spent a total of 48 hours to get FrontendEase up and running.

The History

I have always loved working for my own. Beside my career in software companies, I had a few opportunities to collaborate with small startups where I truly felt I'm in the right environment. Having the freedom to control the process and how work is done from A to Z is very appealing to me.

Then about two weeks I came across Brett from Designjoy. Brett was able to productize his design skills really well. I knew about the concept of productizing your skills a while ago, but seeing Brett's success just pushed me over the edge and I committed to get it done in 48 hours.

A priceless lesson I learnt from Brett is that you have be really really really clear and explicit about the expectations of your business. Go follow him if you're interested in these things, you could learn a thing or two from him.

How did I build FrontendEase?

The tech stack is pretty simple, just pure HTML and CSS. Being an experienced frontend engineer, I could have gone with something fancier like Astro but to be honest I really didn't want to complicate things or take days to have something tangible. After spending years doing something, the basics become more appealing.

For hosting, I went with Netlify. Again back to simplicity, I'm pretty familiar with Netlify, all I wanted is to push to the GitHub repo of the website and Netlify to take care of the rest. Netlify's prices might not be the cheapest, but their user experience is 😙🤌

For analyitcs, I'm using Umami, the free plan has what I exactly need, and the experience is straightforward for someone like me who know the basics about analytics and for a simple website like FrontendEase.

For graphics and illustrations, I used Storyset and Figma. I have been writing code for decades, but before that I used to be a designer so I know my way around design tools like Figma, which was super beneficial to get some graphics done for the website and the sharing material.

For payments, I obviously went with Stripe. As a frontend engineer who works daily with user interfaces, I have a special place in my heart for Stripe's UI. Although Stripe has lots of information in their UI, they did a good job in the user experience. I don't feel lost or distracted on their web application. They hire really good designers and frontend engineers to produce such a beautiful and easy-to-use application despite the complexity.

For scheduling intro calls, I used Rise Calendar. I have been using Rise Calendar for a while now because I have multiple calendars and I want an application to aggregate all my events in one place. Rise Calendar comes with a neat feature that finds the empty gaps in your calendar and generates a link that you can share with the world to book time on your calendar.

Spreading the word

My first approach is to use my existing network to spread the word about FrontendEase. My biggest network is currently on LinkedIn, so I wrote about FrontendEase there:

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7176986188199665667/

I also posted on Twitter/X but I don't have a big audience on Twitter (yet 😉).

I'll be launching on ProductHunt next Monday, hopefully this will go well!

Any feedback is welcome. If you're interested in FrontendEase and want to check it out, you can find it at frontendease.dev