011: The Jamosphere - Lunch Money!

Welcome to Remotely Interesting brought to you by Netlify.

In this episode, we start diving into the awesomeness that is the Jamstack ecosystem, which we fondly refer to as The Jamosphere (cue cool, funky theme song). What better way to kick off this segment than with the Jamstack Conf Web App of the Year: Lunch Money! We were thrilled to have the brilliant solopreneur, engineer & designer of Lunch Money, Jen Yip, join us in discussing the creation of the app. We discuss the origin story, the tech timeline, tools Jen's built and were awe-struck by the mere fact that she actually carried out a side-project to its (successful) fruition. Like, what? People can do that?! Jokes aside, it was very inspiring to hear Jen's tech journey. We hope it inspires you too!

People who were remotely interesting:

• Ben Hong
• Cassidy Williams
• Jason Lengstorf
• Phil Hawksworth
• Tara Z. Manicsic

With Special Guest:

• Jen Yip!

SHOW NOTES:

What is Lunch Money

• a description from the creator herself
• a team on ONE

The origin story

• Jen's blog post: "Life in Fukuoka: Building an app, freelancing, and living abroad"
• a need to track expenses while traveling
• a complex google sheet turned sparked the project
• lots of data and spreadsheets galore
• from side project to hacker news FP

The Tech of Lunch Money

• picking a mix of familiar and new tech
  • Familiar: React w Node backend
  • New: TypeScript & Semantic UI
• Flutter misstep & to mobile or not to mobile
• How do you manage ops? dunno (lol)
  • Heroku
• Third-party services & self-made tools
  • Stripe for billing
  • In-house: trip campaign, referral program, gift cards, etc.
  • a list of the features of Lunch Money

Using the Jamstack Approach

• "Oh they call this the Jamstack"
• makes it easy to iterate, deploy, roll back, and hone in on issues
• In the Jamstack you can use APIs or build them yourself it's more about decoupling
• Decoupling & breaking things down to help manage them
  • splitting different tasks on separate servers

The Ups & Downs

• Timezones! ʕノ•ᴥ•ʔノ ︵ ┻━┻
• seamless feature implementation thanks to good architecture

The Future of Lunch Money

• solo or non-solo?
• hiring out contractors for OSS auxiliary features
• what features are next? month-to-month planning
  • e.g. more people needed bulk imports so CSV importing was prioritized
  • a combo of what users want and what's best for the development of the project

TidBits & ThoughtThings™️

If you have an unlimited budget for just one category of spending, what would it be?

As always, we hope you find it remotely interesting.

TRANSCRIPT: