One year, twelve apps. Day 41.

Hey everyone, I’m STW Mason and welcome to week six of my journey to create 52 apps in 52 weeks! Let's dive into what’s been going on this week. Honestly, I was feeling a bit lost, wondering what the heck is the point of all this. I sat down and did a brain dump to get it all out of my head. The Friday feeling hit me hard and I’m pumped to share it with you!

Week Review

This week, I rolled out an app called “Missing You Do Dev” because I knew it would take me less than a day. I wanted to stick to my rule of launching something within a week, but as a developer, I tend to go overboard with features. Stop it, Mason! I had to remind myself of my challenge rules, but let's be real: seven days is just an arbitrary number. Why not ten days? Or 28 days in a month? Life’s messy, and so is this process!

New Projects

This week, I ended up creating two Chrome extensions, and I want to share them with you:

• LinkedIn Reply Guy: This extension lets you create replies on LinkedIn effortlessly. I’ll showcase how this works below.
• WhatsApp Scraper: Here's where ethical concerns come into play. This scraper was meant to save all my chats onto my local disk, but ethically, it didn't sit right with me, so I'm stepping back from that idea.

LinkedIn Reply Guy

Let me show you what the LinkedIn Reply Guy can do. I’ll open my Chrome developer mode, load the extension, and give it a whirl!

Open Chrome -> Developer Mode -> Load unpacked -> Select LinkedIn Reply Guy

Now I can compose AI-generated replies based on LinkedIn posts. It’s pretty handy if you want to engage in conversations without the hassle of crafting a response each time!

WhatsApp Scraper

This one raised some eyebrows ethically. I had envisioned creating a robot that saves all my past WhatsApp conversations, but then I thought: “What’s the point?” People think their messages are encrypted and private, not archived on my local machine!

Instead, I was thinking about creating a chat-bot version of myself using all my past messages and opinions. The ‘Stuart Mason from 2030’ concept—imagine chatting with that! It sounds cool, but I don’t want to mislead anyone about how they communicate with me.

To-Do List and Marketing

I’ve got a lot on my plate, including:

1. Getting both Chrome extensions live on my site StuartMason.co.uk.
2. Getting my content seen on Product Hunt.
3. Finding ways to boost my cringe-level and market my projects without second-guessing myself.
4. Indexing my domains on Google—because if the build is there and no one sees it, did it really happen?

Reflections

This week has been a rollercoaster of emotions. I’ve realized that marketing is just as vital as development. Learning new technologies, like React and Expo, has been challenging, especially with AI-driven development, where I sometimes feel like I’m just an intern managing the project rather than becoming a developer.

But hey, I'm now 10% into this project, and learning to stay focused and on track is key. Let’s get it done!

Moving Forward

It’s Friday, and boy, am I excited for the weekend! I plan on taking a walk by the sea, letting the ideas float in. I’ll jot them down, work through my priorities, and tackle my to-do list.

I’m looking forward to next week, where I’ll dive deeper into AI-driven development and continue building exciting things. Let’s goooooo!