Sidenote
Published Biweekly




ISSUE — A Solo Developer's Tech Notes



Slowly, but
built to the finish.



Five side projects, three failures, and everything up to pressing the deploy button. Every two weeks, I write the real story that happens behind the screen — not the polished conclusion, but the process of building itself.












Vertical still life of a hand resting on a notebook on a desk


Why I Write



Hi, I'm Kim Do-hyun. By day I work as a backend engineer, and by night and on weekends I build small products on my own.



At first I wrote just so I wouldn't forget. A deploy error I barely fixed at 3 a.m., a type error that ate up two hours — if you don't write these down, you're bound to run into them again.


Then I realized: one well-documented failure helps someone far more than ten half-baked success stories.


So 'Sidenote' isn't a finished tutorial. It's closer to a working log — capturing the getting stuck, the backtracking, and the rebuilding, exactly as they happened.




— Kim Do-hyun, Sidenote








Recent Notes


Recent Posts

View All Posts →




No.01 Retrospective


What I Learned Shutting Down a Side Project After Six Months


12 MAU, $0 in revenue. Here are the three data points a failed project left behind, and what I'd change if I started over.



2024.05.09



No.02 Infrastructure


A Personal Server Architecture That Survives on ₩12,000 a Month


Not overbuilt, but not something that wakes you up at dawn either. Here's how I run two side projects on a single small VPS — and where its limits show.



2024.04.25



No.03 TypeScript


The Design Holes That Surfaced Once I Removed 'any'


I narrowed just one type, and five functions fell apart. Let's follow the code to see what "catching mistakes at compile time" really means.



2024.04.11











"Code eventually disappears. But the judgment behind writing that code, once put into words, becomes the starting point for whoever comes next."



Sidenote · No.07 — 'Why I Write Every Week'









Topics


Topics I Cover




No.01

Side Project Retrospectives

A record from launch to shutdown, capturing both the numbers and the feelings.



No.02

Deployment & Infrastructure

How to run servers at a scale one person can handle, and the trade-offs involved.



No.03

TypeScript

Habits for catching mistakes at compile time instead of at runtime.



No.04

Productivity Tools

Editor setups I tailor to fit me, plus small bits of automation.



No.05

What I've Read

Sentences and ideas I've picked up from tech books, papers, and other people's code.



No.06

Career Notes

How I keep learning and finding my direction outside of the day job.









Newsletter



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