When I started building Jottings, I didn't set out to create a perfect SaaS product. I set out to scratch an itch—my own—and see where it would lead.
The Problem I Couldn't Ignore
I've been writing online for over a decade. Blog posts, newsletters, micro-updates, link collections—you name it, I've tried it. But there was always something missing. The existing platforms felt too rigid or too complicated. Some forced me into their editorial flow. Others required too much infrastructure to maintain. A few simply disappeared.
I wanted a space that was mine. Simple. Fast. Minimal. A place where I could write without overthinking the technology or worrying about vendor lock-in. And I wanted it to scale beautifully, from my first post to thousands of posts, without breaking my bank account or my sanity.
Most importantly, I wanted to own it. Not in a corporate sense, but in a way that felt personal and sustainable.
Why I Went Serverless (And Nearly Lost My Mind)
Building Jottings' architecture was a journey in itself. I chose AWS Lambda + Cloudflare because I believed in a few principles:
No servers to manage. I didn't want to babysit infrastructure. I have a day job. I have a life outside of this.
Pay only for what I use. A serverless architecture means Lambda only runs when someone uses the platform. If nobody creates a jot for a week, I pay almost nothing. That's beautiful.
Global distribution from day one. Cloudflare handles the frontend and CDN, making sites lightning-fast everywhere.
Sounds great in theory, right?
In practice, I spent weeks wrestling with DynamoDB transactions to ensure user counters didn't get out of sync. I debugged subtle race conditions where site creation would succeed but user stats wouldn't update. I learned—sometimes the hard way—that "serverless" doesn't mean "worry-free."
There was a particularly brutal week where I was trying to optimize the build system. Jottings generates static HTML for every site when you create a post. This involves pulling metadata, parsing markdown, generating RSS feeds, and uploading everything to Cloudflare R2. For a moment, I wondered if I'd chosen the wrong technology stack entirely.
Then I realized: the problem wasn't serverless architecture. The problem was me overthinking it. Once I accepted the constraints and designed with them in mind (not against them), everything clicked.
The Challenges Nobody Warns You About
Authentication is harder than it looks. I didn't want to reinvent the wheel, so I used AWS Cognito. But adding OAuth support—Google and Apple Sign-In—meant implementing a custom callback flow, managing identity providers, and handling all the edge cases around user creation and email verification. It took longer than I expected, but the result feels polished.
Building in public is lonely. Most of my development happens in private GitHub repos and local Docker containers. I rarely get to show work-in-progress to anyone. I celebrate wins alone, debug problems alone, make tough architectural decisions alone. It's the trade-off of building solo.
Defining scope is a superpower. I've learned this the hard way. Every new feature idea—tags, pagination, custom domains, media uploads—feels urgent and important. But saying "no" to 90% of ideas and focusing deeply on 10% is what actually gets things shipped. I had to unlearn the startup mentality of trying to build everything at once.
The toughest problem was media uploads. I wanted users to upload photos without friction, but I also wanted to optimize them automatically on the client. I spent days researching image formats, compression algorithms, and resizing strategies. The final solution uses client-side WebP/JPEG conversion and automatic resizing to 1200px max width. It's clean, efficient, and the user never has to think about it.
The Decisions I Still Question
Would I do anything differently?
Honestly, maybe. I spent a lot of time optimizing DynamoDB queries that probably didn't need optimization. I over-engineered the site generation pipeline early on. I went down rabbit holes on feature ideas that never made it to production.
But here's the thing: those "mistakes" taught me more than the things that went smoothly. They made me a better engineer. They forced me to understand my own architecture deeply. And they made Jottings better in ways I couldn't have anticipated.
If I could go back, I'd probably spend less time on premature optimization and more time getting the product in front of people earlier. I'd ship the MVP faster. But I can't go back, so I'm taking that lesson with me for the next thing I build.
The Joy of Building
Here's what they don't tell you about solo development: it's incredibly satisfying.
There's a moment—usually around 2 AM on a Tuesday—when something that's been broken for days suddenly works. The build system generates your static site in 5 seconds. The images load instantly. The authentication flow feels seamless. You push it live and someone, somewhere, creates their first jot.
That feeling? Nothing compares to it. You built this. It's not perfect. It never will be. But it works, and people are using it, and it matters.
I've watched Jottings grow from a weekend side project to a platform that users rely on for their digital presence. People have written hundreds of posts on Jottings. Some are building personal knowledge bases. Others are running entire niche blogs. A few brave souls added custom domains and are running their brands on Jottings.
That's real.
What's Next
I'm still actively developing Jottings. There are features on the roadmap—better analytics, Pro tiers, theme customization—but I'm being intentional about what I build and why.
The biggest lesson I've learned is this: building something real beats building something perfect. Real means messy, imperfect, and in motion. Real means your users tell you what matters. Real means you iterate based on actual needs, not imagined ones.
If you're thinking about building your own product, starting a side project, or taking a leap into solo development: do it. Not because you'll get rich or famous, but because the journey itself is the reward. You'll learn more than any course or book could teach you. You'll build something you can be proud of.
And maybe, just maybe, you'll discover that your itch is someone else's itch too.
If you've been thinking about starting a blog or personal site, Jottings is ready for you. No complex setup. No monthly fees unless you want Pro features. Just you, your writing, and a clean, minimal platform built to stay out of your way.