Learning to Code, Bonding with My Son, and Finding Unexpected Joy
I've poured countless hours into bootstrapping my SaaS. While successful, it left me pondering what really matters. Turns out, the journey yielded unexpected riches. Let me share my surprising realization, and the way it profoundly impacted my 8-year-old son.
I've been building my business for some time now. It's been a a lot of hard work, a lot more luck, and a nonstop learning experience. I taught myself the whole modern web development stack (JavaScript, Vue, Firebase, TypeScript...) on top of everything else it takes to run a small business.
Right now, it's very successful, and my users are really happy. That's awesome, but it comes with massive platform risk. The future of this business is uncertain, which has led to some reflection.
The biggest takeaway is this: no matter what happens, the skills and knowledge I've gained are mine forever. That sense of growth and capability is incredibly empowering.
But here's the most surprising, meaningful part:
My son is 8, and he watched me for a year as I built this thing on nights and weekends. He would sit next to me at night in bed while I hacked away at my laptop. He would get great joy when I would forget a closing quote and VSCode would suddenly report 13 errors. Eventually he asked if he could try coding.
I created a little boilerplate project for him, and explained how each part of the page was like a lego block. If you put them together, you have a whole "app". We sat together while he worked through reproducing a little sample site for him, and he got a lot of joy out of seeing it come to life. We leaned on Github Copilot a lot - the tab autocompletion really lowered the barrier of entry for someone who is a really slow typer. I don't know what AI will do to the coding profession in the long term, but it's magical teaching someone to code like this.
He created a site that is about his interests, with a Gemini chatbot he could talk to.
I'm sharing this because I never imagined starting my SaaS would spark something so wonderful in my son. I'm still figuring out the business side, but this experience feels priceless.
For reference, here's the tech stack I used to make it simple for him:
- Vue 3, Vite, and Quasar, with Typescript and the Composition API
- Tailwind styled Quasar components using UnoCSS
- Auto-imports of Vue imports and Quasar components
- Gemini AI Chat using a Firebase extension
- Github action to automatically deploy to Firebase via CI/CD