You take a deep breath and let out a sigh.

You can't believe it's finally real.

After 400 hours of hard work.

It's done.

You finished coding version 1.

Time to kick back and take this evening off.

Tomorrow is launch day.

A week later you're talking to somebody who built a similar project:

You: "It took me 400 hours! I'm so happy to be done"

Them: "400 hours? Why? My first version took me a weekend."

You're dumbfounded.

A weekend? How is that possible?

You go over all the things you had to implement in your head:

- A beautiful user interface

- Subscription payments

- A custom API wrapper

- Conditional rendering

- User authentication

- Automated Emails

- Cloud functions

- Business logic

- A database

That's impossible!

There's no way they could build all that in a weekend.

_______

This is a mistake I see developers make all the time.

I call it "The pitfall of knowledge"

Just because you can: doesn't mean you should.

You could build all those things yourself.

I'm sure it would be a good learning experience.

But of all those these have been built 100,000 times:

- Subscription payments

- A custom API wrapper

- Conditional rendering

- User authentication

- Automated Emails

- Cloud functions

- A database

This means the only thing you actually built was:

- A beautiful user interface

- Business logic

This is a mistake I made all the time.

Always doing more than I need to.

With my new approach, I was able to build a LinkedIn SaaS for generating AI comments in 3 days.

It cost me $279 to save myself 200 hours of work.

A pretty good deal if you ask me.

Stop reinventing the wheel.

Nobody will give you an award.

Here are my top three ways to save monstrous amounts of time when building a project.

Boilerplate

A lot of developers never consider using something like a boilerplate but it is a lifesaver.

You can get a product up and running in days instead of weeks or months.

Last week I build a project using the Serverless SaaS boilerplate from Jake Prins.

It comes with documentation, videos, and unlimited licenses. It can do all of this out of the box:

- Subscription payments

- Conditional rendering

- User authentication

- Automated Emails

- Cloud functions

- A database

And it was only $279 for an unlimited license.

I have no affiliation with this product nor am I saying this is something you should buy.

But here's the point:

When given the option to spend 200 hours or $279.

I'll spend $279 every single time.

Any type of project you want to build has elements that have been built 100,000 times. Don't reinvent the wheel doing the basic things.

Find a boilerplate for what you need to do.

Set it up with your services.

Only write the unique logic for your project.

If you were building a car you wouldn't reinvent the wheel.

You would buy it, or use existing designs.

Do the same thing with your software.

The boilerplate route is buying the wheel.

But what if you want to use existing designs?

Well, there's a website that's great for that...

Github

Every software developer has heard of Github.

A website is full of public repositories and open-source projects.

And there are people building projects every single day.

If you have never looked you will be shocked at the number of things that have already been built on GitHub.

Let's say I'm making a project with Node.js and Javascript and I want to interact with LinkedIn data.

I could write some code myself to do what I want.

or I could go to GitHub.

1. Search for "LinkedIn"
2. Filter by "Javascript"
3. Get results for hundreds of LinkedIn-related libraries:

You won't always find exactly what you're looking for, but it is definitely worth checking.

Any time you are building a project ask yourself:

Am I building something that has been done before?

If so seek out a solution online before building yourself.

It will save you thousands of hours over the course of your career.

ChatGPT

The last one is the newest one, and I have found this extremely valuable for not reinventing the wheel.

If I'm building a function that does something new and has never been done before I find that this tool has a hard time doing that. However, if I'm doing something that has been done 100 times it is a lifesaver.

It gets code wrong often since the knowledge is from 2021, but it can still give you a baseline in less than 10 seconds, is tailored to your needs, and is always worth trying.

Let's say I need to make a call to the LinkedIn API to get the contents of a post. Something I needed to do earlier this week.

I could go to the LinkedIn API and read 2 paragraphs of documentation.

Or

I can ask ChatGPT to do it for me.

The more specific you get, the better the response.

Here is an example of a response I got when I knew some useful details:

I think that speaks for itself.

Work smarter. Not harder.

And please. I'm begging you:

Don't reinvent the wheel

_______________________________________________________

I hope this helps you all out there or inspires an idea.

If you have any questions or want to say hi you can always reach me at:

swdlodonnell@gmail.com

Thank you all for reading.

I hope you got some value out of this.

See you next Saturday.