iHateReading: Breaking down software development
How and Why
Under the Hood
Well, the story begins way back in 2021/22, post-COVID. Honestly, it begins way back during my first job in 2019, I was in Mumbai, India, working for a startup as a frontend infra developer, what’s the difference is I was working with CORE UI libraries and infrastructure in the client-side.
That was quite outbreaking and challenging task switching from DSA to DOM elements along with CSS and React is a bit different from difficult. Then, I found Medium, the platform you are reading this blog.
So once I saw Medium, the first thought I had was WOW, I would love to have a similar platform for me to write and publish my opinion, yeah, I was quite sure to only share my opinion. Content creation comes later in the picture when I’ve to run a business to financially depend on it; otherwise, till now, writing is like my first job. Medium was very new 5/6 years ago, so was Twitter, I am talking about 2019.
Medium in India was also not available to write for earning, the main reason is Stripe, medium was using Strip as payment platform service and Stripe wasn’t and still not much available in India the another main reason is with the RBI(Reserve Bank Of India) rules in India, the similar is the reason why UPI is still not ready to open the APIs for everyone or so-called developers to use payment service.
Moving ahead, so for me Medium just amaze me and then I did some more research and find dev.to and then hashnode.com and then more in web3 and niche ecosystem and so on.
The first thing I decided to simply write content and share on the website and since I was very new so I decided to go with very basic things as all developers do
- Create Backend APIs for CURD and Authentication
- Deploy on Heroku
- Create frontend React app
- Deploy app on Heroku, Vercel was quite new then back
But later one, I’ve found Firebase (from my office colleagues), the best part of working in startups is its help to stay updated and quickly update your tech stack as well, what I mean by startup is the team/company that build quickly, launches fast and scales efficiently.
Developers including me who have worked on simple node, express and backend app with mongodb or SQL can understand how good Firebase, Supabase, ClickDB, Neon, Appwrite databases along with Nextjs like frameworks are nowadays. Then back, managing and running simple node, express app for FREE on heroku and launching the app with all features like authentication was not that straightforward like today.
Stackoverflow will be the main reason why it’s a next google for developers then back, before chatgpt came into the picture.
Finding solutions on stackverflow needs people, experience develoepers including the single fact that those developers are willing to kindly share the knowledge and errors along with solutions, some of the solutions on stackoverflow have more then 100k of likes.
Firebase makes easy for me to switch from custom backend application to client-side full-stack application. Then came vercel in the picture to quickly switch OFF from heroku and launch your idea on custom domain for FREE and Firebase pay-as-you-go is the most loved feature, in my opinion.
At 2020 end, the iHateReading tech stack now has
- Nextjs
- Tailwind
- Material UI
- Redux
- Firebase
- Axios
Then I decided to have my own editor to write blog and editorjs was the perfect choice apart from in-house development or custom editor.
Editorjs was like Notion editor so i pefer using it and it’s easy to work in React but performance was and still is the issue with editorjs
I was handling an Admin panel development for a company, Koo, in India in 2020, it was my second job. Koo is the alternative to Twitter in india and it supports native language, in details Koo supports 12 indian languages on the platform, one can write Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and more
I was shocked to know Koo shutdown in 2024, last year. Otherwise the team was quite dedicated and while working on Admin panel I’ve understood it’s importance.
ihatereading admin was built using editorjs, that can help me to write content and publish on the database, firestore. Simple and easy.
Newsletter
The content creation is quite trending on social media like YouTube, LinkedIn and Medium and then came Substack. The newsletter writing and earning platform is similar to Medium.
Substack give me this idea to start our own newsletter and another reason is data, of course. Same admin panel now have another editor to write email and then bulk emails.
2 years ago before Resend came into picture, we have mailchimp, AWS SES, sendgrid, node mailer to send bulk emails and again it needs dedicated backend server so it was not straightforward. I was using courier messaging platform to send emails but it has limitation of creating emails using template on the platform itself but we need some customisable and dynamic generating HTML to send directly as emails, it gives more power and I was do it directly using admin panel newsletter creator.
I was things to just work since I am the only one using it.
Newsletter need one more thing is content for newsletter, so for that another research begins along with finding gaps in the internet.
- Few newsletter covering software development programming onlu topics
- Very less for very niche topics like react-native, flutter, game development, npm packages
For content, I’ve decided to bookmark few website from the internet on thw browser but since the number was increasing day-by-day I’ve to go for Notion or other storage unit.
The number have reached to 300+ websites to understand/learn programming concepts and new things to share on the newsletter with the audience that I’ve decided to launch universo as well.
And the same reason, I’ve found that no website provide the list of websites that offer jobs and have launched job portals.
So slowly, slowly, iHateReading was talking some shape and people are respondingto it as well.
Roadmaps
This my personal touch, one of my friend want’s to learn frontend development and he asked me the roadmap, so I quickly create a detailed roadmap on Notion and shared with him.
He like it so does I and I launched it on the gumroad and notion but then I got this idea, last year, to bring roadmaps on the website.
Each roadmap is nothing but DOM Tree or nested JSON and that’s helps me to decided the backend firebase firestore schema to reduce API calls and storage size.
In the same admin panel, I then create the nested editor like Notion, Editor inside Editor meaning a page inside Editorjs. This helps me quickly create notion like nested content, but later on after few weeks, I’ve realised that I can use Notion API to transfer data from Notion to Firebase 😃
As they say, one can only do smart work by only doing hard-work
Also I didn’t know about Notion API, later on when I saw feathers.so to realise about Notion API.
I was shocked because the roadmap editor in the admin panel have taken weeks, 2 weeks and one API can save that time.
Roadmaps was live and launched in Jan this year.
Store page is also the next launched we have in Feb and March of 2025, store page provides ready-made templates at very cheap cost, responsive code, production-level code, database and API and redux installed along with frontend UI components and pages.
Store page is nothing new just to share some templates and more importantly make some earning because our server cost for increasing because of 30k montly active users from 196 countries, yes all over the world.
Currently iHateReading:
Tech Stack:
- Nextjs
- Vercel
- Firebase
- Supabase
- Resend
- React Query
- Tailwind
- Lucide Icons
- Redux
- Tiptap Editor
- Express Node
- Render
Stay tuned and do subscribe to our newsletter as more things are in pipeline 😄
That’s it for today, see you in the next one
Shrey
iHateReading.
