First project w/ redwood: isBusy - free personal status page for remote work

Hey all!

Wanted to drop a little note in here to say that I created my first thing w/ Redwood! It was great fun to work with, even being pre-production ready and all that.

I made a free personal status page for remote work: check it out at https://www.producthunt.com/posts/isbusy or https://isbusy.app. Totally free and just something to make remote work a little easier in these hard times :hugs:

Thank you to everyone for your work on this project! Looking forward to getting more involved in contributing etc. going forward!

9 Likes

Hey @markthethomas. This is awesome! I just signed up. I’m going to have to figure out my actual eating hours now. :sweat_smile:

I think we’re all dying to know: what was it like developing? Any pain points? Any pain points that were noticeably missing? And if you have any insights on Services, we’d especially love to hear that.

Thanks for sharing this with us, it’s always really exciting to see things made with Redwood.

2 Likes

Great Work! I love the tour feature.

How did you implement that?

2 Likes

By coincidence, the last company I worked at Working Not Working was created by a guy who had this same issue—he was a freelance creative who wanted to let potential employers know when he was available for work or not (working vs. not working). He used to manually swap out a GIF on his personal site and ended up making a whole business out of it!

2 Likes

haha no way! that’s crazy! I’m not anticipating turning this into anything money-wise, but would be cool to see it grow into something substantial.

I’ve had a few side projects I’ve started over the years and many are either too ambitious where I need to sink a ton of time into them to succeed or they were too niche. I had a project that was nearly done called BlinDNS that does exactly what https://nextdns.io/ does. I ended up scrapping it because they had built literally what I envisioned and competing wasn’t something I wanted for that project.this is the first one in a bit that was easier but didn’t involve me setting up crazy complicated infrastructure and solves a need lol :smile:

Good question! I actually used reactour (https://github.com/elrumordelaluz/reactour#readme) because I didn’t want to roll that part myself. For side projects I’ve started keeping a rule where I only roll my own X if it’s really truly necessary OR if I want to learn about that. did that for some other projects to learn more about DNS, kubernetes, Golang, AWS stuff, high-throughput systems, full-text search, and even building a database from scratch. Learned a ton but the project was more of a “learning” thing vs. an actual outcome. Trying to focus more on outcomes/finishing nowadays :smile:

@markthethomas this is quite cool, thank you for sharing.

It looks like this app and vida.io are quite DB heavy - if you don’t mind, could I ask how you’re connecting to your DB? We’re struggling to connect to Postgres via RDS proxy, or Aurora Serverless - it seems AWS wants the lambda to be in the same VPC, which isn’t possible with netlify unless you’re really big.

Any tips would be really appreciated!

2 Likes

for sure! I use a shared postgres instance for pretty much all my side projects (except for a handful that use dynamo or mongo) and have tried a few different things w/ RDS. One tradeoff you run into if you’re not using AWS is that RDS proxy, Aurora Serverless, etc. all need to be w/in a VPC :frowning_face: that makes local dev hard w/o setting up a proxy server or bastion server.

So…yeah - if you want to use those technologies, really no way to do it aside from forking out for the enterprise level :frowning:

1 Like

@danny vida.io dev here. I notice you mentioned vida.io. If you run your DB inside AWS, you need to open it to all IP addresses, basically the whole internet. You add 0.0.0.0/32 to your security group. There’s a discussion of this.

1 Like

Thank you both for your answers! In the end we’ve gone with digital ocean, which supports pg_bouncer pretty much out of the box.

I’ll create another thread for a walkthrough of this!

Sorry for the misunderstanding on who the author was of each :grinning:

Curious to learn more about this experience and the limitations you hit with Netlify. We do have a direct channel to their team and try to provide as much feedback, requests, etc. as possible. So if there’s a challenge/barrier using AWS DBs with Netlify Functions, that would be really good to know. If possible, could you start a new topic and @ me? No pressure if you’re not available.

1 Like

@markthethomas it’s been a while. How are things going with isBusy?!?

1 Like

hey! indeed it has! things are pretty quiet but people seem to consistently use it, which is great! :slight_smile:

1 Like