- #personal
- #career
- #building-in-public
From Coding Temple to my first deployed site
A year of practice, three days of wrestling with Vercel, one live URL.
aldowebsitellc.xyz is live.
That sentence took 14 months to earn. Here's the rough timeline.
Months 1–3 (Coding Temple cohort): JavaScript fundamentals, React basics, daily code reviews. Felt like drinking from a hose. Built five todo apps. Hated all of them.
Months 4–8: Picked up TypeScript, Next.js, Postgres. Started reading other people's code on GitHub. Slowly, things stopped feeling like magic.
Months 9–12: Started building real things — internal tools for the cohort, a small Flask API for a friend's side project, a Stripe integration for someone's coaching business. Made my first dollar from code.
Month 13: Started studying for eJPT. Realized half of "security" is just "knowing how the thing works under the hood." That made me a better developer.
Month 14 (now): Shipped this site. Three days of wrestling with the deploy — Supabase keys in the wrong scope, middleware throwing on every route, a Tailwind class I had typo'd. Each error taught me something I won't forget.
What I'm doing differently next:
- Deploying earlier. I waited until the site was "done." Should have shipped a one-page version on day one and iterated in public.
- Writing as I go. This post would have been better with notes from the actual debugging sessions.
- Saying yes to small paid work. My first 10 clients will teach me more than my next 10 side projects.
If you're reading this and you're where I was a year ago: pick the next smallest thing and ship it. The rest is reps.
