Real-emails.com Series #3 – Not live 😬

Lessons learned from a failed deadline.

Failures

It's early morning on Thursday where I live, and this is what real-emails.com still looks like online:

And here's my current status:

• Friday:

  • ✅ Project setup

  • ✅ User registration & authentication

  • ✅ API service with API key authentication

  • ✅ Endpoints specifications

    • 🐰 Studied existing APIs with the same purpose, such as check-mail.org or Mailjet’s validation API.a

• Sunday:

  • ❌ Blocklist matching implementation

    • 🐰 Spent some time exploring existing blocklists and their sources, documenting myself on risky domains & spam detection, etc.

  • ❌ Dynamic checks & results caching

• Monday:

  • ❌ Payment setup & implementation

• Tuesday:

  • ❌ Server provisioning

  • ❌ real-emails.com domain configuration

  • ❌ Deployment preparation

• Wednesday:

  • ❌ Production deployment

  • ❌ Live tests

I have barely done more than what I thought I could achieve on Friday evening.

On top of that, I wanted to post daily on X, but I haven't sent a single message besides the project announcement.

All in all, it's not brilliant.

But I can't say I'm disappointed with myself, though, and here’s why:

Learnings

A few months ago, I set out to join the Indie Hackers movement and “build in public”.

In my very first post, I wrote:

My objective: personal fulfilment and financial autonomy.
But to be honest, I have no idea where this will take me.

What I do know is that it took me a long time to dare, and that I will learn many things along the way. Through failures and successes alike.

This small project with a short deadline is probably the best choice I could have made to put myself into learning mode.

Why? Because a short-term goal is much more motivating.

I still like Speakerine’s idea, but it is a larger project that I can only finish in a longer time frame.
Pivoting to a smaller project and imposing a short deadline gave me much more valuable information on:

🎯 How well can I focus on delivering what's needed and forget the rest?
It starts with framing the idea and giving yourself precise objectives. I think I did this part well enough.

However, I do tend to lose focus while I work and start exploring adjacent topics, or things I think “would be nice if the project works”.
Well, get it to work first!

👨🏼‍💻 How efficient am I when it comes to coding?
Clearly, the last few years of not coding at all and the last decade+ of not coding with Ruby/Rails have made me rusty.
And I did try to learn Rust, but that's not what I mean 😅

Whatever I build at the moment requires some back-and-forth between my code and the docs or between my editor and my browser to test things out.

The last few days have made me more confident, and I can feel that I'm catching up on things I once mastered, but I'm still feeling quite slow.
I also tend to overthink my code & architecture, so I'm trying to stick to the YAGNI principle: You Ain't Gonna Need it!

Hopefully, I'll get back to better speeds soon!

👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 How much time & energy can I dedicate to this?
This is maybe the biggest thing: I have a regular job and a family.
When I return home from work, my top priority is not, and should not be, my indie projects.

It's my family.

Only when everyone is fed, washed and tucked in bed can I start working again.

It usually means starting a bit late and, as a result, going quite late to bed. Which makes me tired and is not sustainable on the long run.

And of course, it's also important that I keep some quality time with my wife. This is something that's easy to neglect when you're head-on in your projects.

To be honest, that's the one main impact I've noticed from setting this one-week deadline for myself: duties done? Let's get to work!

Moving forward, I have to take that into account and set reasonable expectations for myself — there is actually no way for me to work every day or night on my projects.

So, where does this leave me?

Next steps

I am like most developers: too optimistic with time estimations.

On top of that, I have constraints I must take into account to plan my projects realistically.

Pushing myself to work on real-emails.com, something I consider quite a small project, was a great way for me to have this reality check I needed!

Now I do want to finish and deploy it, as the next step will be to work on marketing it and getting some sales in.

This time I'll give myself until end of next week to have my v1 live on real-emails.com.

I'll keep reporting here; see you soon!