This. A lot of people seem to be missing the forest for the trees. General point I took away was if you're starting on a new project and you're thinking about which tools (language, framework, db, etc) to use before you've taken time to understand the problem and articulate a solution (UX), you're not really setting yourself up for success. That seems pretty reasonable to me.
I had a similar itch and built a similar app, except snippets are captured as searchable text and organised by books [1]. It was only ever my second app and app building for me is as much about the journey as the destination so it took me a lot longer than 1h/24h.
I agree with the premise of the article ie build small, monetize, learn.
Other lessons I've learned:
Promotion is harder than building. It's pretty hard to get more than a few downloads per day.
Free or not, once it's out there your users will make demands. I got emails from all over the world requesting all sorts of new features.
Simple is better. Almost all feedback I got was that the app did one thing well (actually good enough).
Try different monetisation strategies.
Click bait title with strawman argument. By this author's definition most engineers are not engineers because they're not experts. The moment 'expert' is removed from the definition the argument falls apart.
Some people want to focus on front end problems, some want to focus on backend problems. I personally just want to focus on problems. I'm neither front-end or back-end. I'm a software engineer.
