My first time

I wanted to write about my first time.

I suppose that like everyone else, there were nerves, embarrassment, clumsiness, doubts, and a feeling of "I don't know if I'm ready for this." There were no candles, no soft music, and nothing remotely romantic.

There was a laptop, a code editor, and me, sweating because Flutter wouldn't stop spitting red errors across the screen.

That was my first time creating a digital product.

I'll admit it. I'm a frustrated programmer.

I've lost count of how many times I've tried to learn to code... and how many times I've ended up giving up. At one point, collecting Udemy courses became almost a hobby. Angular, React, Vue, Flutter... I guess I had that feeling that I "needed to know how to code" to be able to build something.

But something from all that jumble actually came in handy.

It was 2020. We were in the middle of a global pandemic and I had just finished a Flutter course. Every day on Twitter, I’d see a bunch of indie hackers building things (a special shout-out to Jacin, who was one of my main inspirations with his CheckMyPresets build in public journey) and I finally decided to leave the theory behind and start doing something.

That's how Twiger was born. An iOS and Android app that arose from a problem I was experiencing: I wanted to repurpose Twitter content for Instagram.

All it did was take a tweet URL and convert it into an image ready to be shared on Instagram Stories.

Building it was quite an experience. I had to piece together everything I had learned about Flutter (or what I could remember), fight through the bureaucracy of uploading apps to the stores, and set up in-app payments with RevenueCat...

During its lifespan, the app generated (if memory serves) about €300 in in-app purchases. It wasn't enough to buy a house, but for me, there was something magical about the feeling that something I had made was useful to other people... and they were paying for it!

But it lasted as long as it lasted. Life happened, and I stopped touching the code for several months. When I wanted to go back to it, I had forgotten almost everything I knew about Flutter.

I tried to update it... and every attempt was a new dumpster fire. It was impossible to maintain. It eventually died from technical neglect.

Looking back, Twiger was exactly what it needed to be: clumsy, brief, intense, and a bit of a disaster. Like almost all first times.

But it was also the one that opened the door to everything that came after. And for that, honestly, I'm happy.