Thank you! It took many, many iterations to get it looking decent and intuitive on first impressions, so I'm really glad to hear this.
My process pretty much followed "build what I need next". So I started with Angular YouTube tutorials, then set up a basic database in Dynamo, using Lambdas + API Gateway. Then as the complexity of the site's data structure changed, I hard pivoted to PostGres (classic). Then I needed to make auth and accounts, so I set up Cognito. I tried to capture a lot of my learning within the site itself in various Goals.
This all happened before chatGPT was around. Then of course when it was available, I would ask it to help me with basic concepts and "what are industry standard ways of doing this?"
What I found to be true 99.9% of the time is, everything I'm trying to do has already been done and solved, I just need to know how to Google it properly. One of the biggest challenges was setting up image + video compression, but even still when I really sat down to handle it, didn't take more than 48 hours to figure out. PWA push notifications were another tough one. Happy to chat about any technical specifics!
Finally, I'll say this. I tried to reinvent the wheel designing the UI many, many times, not wanting the site/posts to look like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. Ultimately, I realized there's good reason all these sites follow the same format: it works, and users understand it intuitively. If I had just decided to use what already works from the beginning, I probably could have shaved 6 months off the project.
