Last weekend, I did something I've never done before.
I shipped a website.
Not a todo app from a tutorial. Not a portfolio page with placeholder text. An actual, living, breathing website that real people can visit.
Like everyone else in tech, I was drowning in productivity tools. Notion, Todoist, ChatGPT, five different note-taking apps I'd forgotten I installed. I'd spend hours researching which tool was "best" instead of, you know, actually being productive.
The irony stung.
So I thought: what if there was a simple place to find and compare these tools? Not some spammy affiliate directory. Just... honest curation.
I'm not going to lie—I barely slept.
I started with a boilerplate because, honestly, I had no idea how to set up authentication or databases from scratch. Next.js, Drizzle, i18n... I was Googling basic things every five minutes. "How to center a div" may or may not have been one of them.
Friday night: setup and confusion.
Saturday: building, breaking, fixing, repeating.
Sunday: more content entry than I'd like to admit, then hitting deploy with shaky hands.
Is it polished? No.
Is it feature-complete? Definitely not.
There are probably bugs I haven't found yet. The design is basic. Half the features I imagined didn't make the cut.
But here's the thing—it's live. At productivity-tools.org. And that feeling of typing my own URL into the browser and seeing something load? Worth every confused 2 AM moment.
Building your first website is humbling. You realize how much you don't know. You make mistakes that seem obvious in hindsight. You question your life choices when a hydration error won't go away.
But you also learn that imperfect and shipped beats perfect and imaginary.
I'm going to keep improving it. Add more tools. Fix the rough edges. Maybe someday it'll be something I'm truly proud of.
But for now? I'm just happy I built something real.
If you're a new developer sitting on an idea, waiting until you're "ready"—stop waiting. You'll never feel ready. Just start.
I did. And my weekend was worth it.
P.S. Check it out at productivity-tools.org. It's rough around the edges, but it's mine. Feedback welcome.
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