Today I launched rootbuilds.com. I have started and failed many personal projects before, this is the first project that I actually shipped to public. Even though it is not in its final form yet, I am pretty happy with the idea and the shape it's in right now.
The motivation for this project has been in my head for a long time: I am deeply unsatisfied with most online learning resources. They are often too superficial, too visually noisy, and frankly just low quality. I want something that is crisp, treats you as an adult with a functioning brain, actually shows you how to do hard things, and is just a delight to work through: no cookies (therefore no stupid consent banners!), fast page load, exercises that run in browser, etc.
Eventually, the ambition is I want to develop full content for topics I am passionate about: compilers, databases, game engines, and explainability of large ML models. I am fully aware that each of these topics would easily take me a year if not more to build and polish, therefore to make sure I break the "never ship" cycle, I decided to start with something less daunting: write about how to build a web app. It may sound laughably simple at first, but it's actually a lot of work to explain React and CSS well. I spent 20+ hours alone polishing the CSS section, and I am pretty confident that the quality of the published version is above 95th percentile among the millions of "how to CSS" articles out there.
I am cautiously optimistic about the financial prospect of this project: online learning is a proven business model, and people into learning are willing to spend nontrivial amount of money on high quality content -- for example, someone made over $500k building a well known online CSS course. And last time I checked very few people are actually creating (good) learning content for hard topics like compilers and databases.
Doing hard things is a competitive advantage.
Shipping the current phase of the project -- building the site, some minimal infrastructure, and writing the content for how to build a web app -- took me 80+ hours, which is 4x of my initial estimate of 20 hours! However, looking back after these 80+ hours, I do believe that I have created something of value, and I am excited about the future value I am going to create.