Hey Makers! 👋

Welcome to Digest 008 of the newsletter. Our featured maker, Pascal, is the author of a web app to create a meal plan for an entire week. 🏆

In a 2018 survey by V. Botev, almost 76% of the subjects stated that they do cook while a small subset of them said they were good at it (26%). Only 13% of the subjects said they know exactly what to cook every time, while 53% had trouble deciding on the meal.

People like cooking at home their own meals however they do have a problem getting from the step where they decide to cook to the step where they actually start cooking. In other words, people had little free time during their busy day for planning their meals.

Fortunately, this problem can be easily solved by using a meal planning app, Yummyplan, that can bring down the process of meal planning from 30 minutes to around 5 minutes. ⭐️

What I’ve Been Reading 📖

• ⭐️ Let’s build an actual working Guitar🎸 with JavaScript 💻🤘: Let’s build a guitar! Well, ok, not a physical guitar, but the next best thing: A digital one!

• Why I Run Django on Kubernetes as a One-Man SaaS: When I first published my post on my tech stack as a one-man SaaS I got wildly different reactions.

• Inside a viral website - Not Fun at Parties: As anyone reading this knows, the Ever Given was stuck in the Suez Canal for just over 6 days. This is an account of running istheshipstillstuck.com.

• The Story of a Unicorn Solo Founder Making $500,000 ARR 🚀: Do what you love, build projects and features people want, and the success will come. I bet you heard that many times.

• How I Launched ValueDensity in One Week: *In my previous article, I’ve explained why I quit my lucrative data scientist job, 18 months back, to become an indiehacker. *

• The Part Time Creator Manifesto: Something unexpected happened when my side project crossed $100k in sales: I didn’t want to quit my job.

Maker Focus 🏆

Featuring one or more makers per digest. Want to be featured as a maker? Fill in this form. ✍️

Pascal Thormeier

Pascal is skilled in problem solving, asking why and how, ability to learn and to adapt quickly. 📦

He is currently re-learning electronics and soldering. 🤖

Product Focus 📦

Yummyplan ⭐️

An app to create a meal plan for an entire week.

Yummyplan is an app that helps you plan your meals for an entire week! Add new meals and ingredients, tag them, plan them, download your week plan and generate a grocery list, all in one.

LogChimp

Build better products with customer feedback.

LogChimp is an open source software to capture your customers feedback and inform your product decisions.

• ✅ Open source
• ✅ Self-hosted
• ✅ Secure and full control of data

FreeScout

Free self-hosted Zendesk & Help Scout alternative.

FreeScout is the super lightweight free open source help desk and shared inbox written in PHP (Laravel framework). It is a self hosted clone of HelpScout.

Now you can enjoy free Zendesk & HelpScout without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.

Tweet Focus

Education 📚 & Resources 🧩

• Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application.

• Shape Up: Stop running in circles and ship work that matters.

• Tech Interview Handbook: Carefully curated content to help you ace your next technical interview.

• Devbook: Devbook is a new kind of search engine made just for developers.

• WriteNext: The writing application that boosts your writing.

• Quizlet: Learning tools & flashcards, for free.

An Interview with Pascal of Yummyplan

Hey Pascal! Let’s start out with your background. 📝

I’m a Software engineer from Switzerland and I love solving problems, learning new things and sharing my knowledge.

I originally got into coding while working with the RPGMaker2000 back in high school. The RPGMaker2000 is a tool to create your own 2D games in the style of Final Fantasy 2 and the like.

It had a scripting system with if/else blocks, loops, integers and boolean variables etc. That was my first point of contact with code.

At some point I wanted my own website to show off my projects, so I learned HTML, CSS and PHP. Along came professional education and some 10 years working in the field.

What is the purpose of your blog, and what resources do you use to get your ideas, if any? 🧩

Sharing my knowledge about all things software development and web. I often write about tools, algorithms and cool stuff I made.

The internet, mostly search engines. Often I come up with ideas myself, but search engines help a lot when I’m stuck.

What is an opinion you have that most people don’t agree with? ✒️

Luck plays a significant role in being successful. You need to meet the right people (you often don’t even know these people exist in the first place), publish your stuff everywhere, solve a problem for you have and see if any other people have the same problem and like your solution.

Success, as I’ve learned, is basically trying over and over and, at some point, a happy coincidence helping you gain traction.

Why was Yummyplan started and is there a roadmap? 🎯

I originally created Yummyplan to digitize an analog solution (with paper and sticky notes) we used at home. I wanted this thing to be as useful as possible and to take away a maximum of the boring work, like looking for that one sticky, random meals if we’re out of ideas or writing the grocery list.

The frontend application is currently published under the MIT license, so it’s open source. Since Yummyplan is more of a hobby project, there is a roadmap, but not really a detailed one.

Next on my list are further bug fixes and a backend to enable cross-device sharing - I got a lot of feedback that this was a highly desired feature.

What is the most challenging problem that’s been solved in Yummyplan so far? 🚧

Definitely the grocery list! There’s multiple steps to this behemoth of a feature.

First, it needs to collect all the ingredients of all selected menus. Those need to be added up (example: if two menus each use 1 liter of milk, the grocery list should show “2 liters of milk”) and are then sorted into categories to make the grocercy trip a lot simpler.

Then there’s the “tick off” feature, a separate list of items don’t need to be bought. The PDF-download was its very own odyssey and I’m still tweaking it.

What is one feature, which you’re most proud of, that differentiates Yummyplan from other products? 🦄

The randomize button and the grocery list are among my favorites. They solve problems we had in real life.

When we were planing our meals with stickies on a piece of paper, we often ran out of ideas. Also, we often forgot grocery items because we didn’t think of them.

Those two features alone brought the process of meal planning from 30 minutes down to around 5 minutes and we never forgot to buy anything crucial ever since.

What is one product that you can’t live without that you think others should know about? 💡

Vivaldi, a browser by the ex core team of Opera. It lives up to the spirit and is an absolute bliss for power users!

If I gave you $1 million to invest in one thing right now, where would you put it? 🚀

Non-profits that help the less-privileged. Some of them, like cafes that offer safe spaces or sports clubs, really struggle in the current situation and could use some financial support.

I’d probably also invest in some startups that work on clean energy or making education more accessibly. ☀️

Thank you Pascal.

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