I’ve recently fallen in love with building and shipping ideas in a few days. With the help of my orange friend, everything in this era feels fast and a little confusing — but I think I’ve found a track I can actually follow.
Starting this week, I’m doing that in public. One real build a week. I also want to give a shoutout to John Crickett, whose challenges are what first got me hooked on building this kind of thing. Some weeks I’ll rebuild systems that already exist, mostly for practice. Other weeks I’ll finally ship ideas I’ve been sitting on for a while.
First one is already out: pdfcomet.com, a free document conversion tool. No signup, no watermark, no catch on the free tier. I built it solo, in a few days. It’s live, but almost nobody knows it exists yet, right now I’m working on its traffic and SEO.
It’s a simple product, hundreds of similar tools already exist, but I wanted to try building the architecture myself and see how something like this actually gets put together end to end. The backend is fully serverless on AWS: a static frontend on CloudFront, files go from the browser to S3, and an async Lambda pipeline converts the file, validates it, and writes the result back to S3. No queues, no servers to manage. Everything, input and output, gets deleted automatically within about 20 minutes.
I’ll write here each week about what I built, what worked, and what didn’t. Follow along on X for the day-to-day, and I’ll post the fuller stories here.