Author here: I use https://www.hevyapp.com/ on the free plan. It has everything you need and I really enjoy the social component. I have a few friends using the app as well, and its fun to see what others are lifting and challenge yourself to beat them.
https://synthql.dev: An alternative to PostgREST focused on the React-Node-PG stack. Main advantage right now is it gives you end to end type safety: you can write type-safe queries straight from your component that directly access your database.
Why SynthQL? My experience working for +10 years on enterprise SaaS is that a quite often you just want a database and a way to fetch data from it. Backends will quite often get in the way adding abstractions and layers upon layers of transformation between DB objects to domain objects to DTOs.
If you ever feel like you just want to talk to the database directly, give SynthQL a try :)
An open-source, type-safe http client to your postgresql database. It let's you access your database directly from your react components. It's fast, safe and performant. Think Graphql but you don't need to implement resolvers, it's all generated from your database schema.
If this sounds interesting to you, ping me (email on my profile) :)
What I would actually like to have is a generic PostgREST, sitting on top of sqlalchemy or something like that so that I can start on sqlite or DuckDB and then swap out the RDBMs if needed.
Assuming the context is for solving real-world problems, not textbook problems:
1. Try to solve the smallest (but similar) problem you can think of. You'll learn a lot along the way and might figure out if it is doable or not. As a reminder, just because a problem is solvable doesn't mean it's solvable at an acceptable level of cost/time/effort. Solving a similar, but smaller problem will help you estimate the feasibility of the larger problem.
2. If the problem is worth solving, it's probably affecting people who in turn have tried to solve it before and are using either approximations or imperfect solutions. Talk to them, understand what they've tried, what works and what doesn't. If the problem affects enough people It's very likely that a solution exists already, it just hasn't been generalised, productised, or automated yet.
Congrats on the launch. Building a product of this complexity is no easy feat! Out of curiosity: given the old adage that a product needs to be 10x to overcome switching costs, how do you prove users that you are 10x better than Google Sheets or Excel?
Moving to Mars is analogous to a full app re-write.
Instead of dealing with the "technical debt" that we've built on earth over the past couple thousand years, the proposal is that we start off with a clean slate.
I'm not saying it can't work, but if software engineering has thought us anything at all it's that full app re-writes are generally a terrible idea. The sheer complexity and vast amount of unknown unknowns is what generally kills these projects and what would also kill any attempt at re-building civilisation in a foreign planet.
Don't re-write, refactor and fix the bugs on earth.
Except there’s no intention to deprecate Earth and replace it with Mars. Not a rewrite, just new parallel development. Should we never start new software projects at all? All the code ever written should be in one repo (probably in FORTRAN)?
