LinkStash v1.0.0 is released! 🚀

On a personal note, 2024 is a challenging year. I am happy to end it by releasing this. But, oh boy, what a ride this has been.

I just released LinkStash, a bookmark manager, on github. This is my journey getting here.

Before I continue, I want to acknowledge that LinkStash is objectively not a major achievement. Projects like Linkding and Pinboard have inspired me and set the standard I aspire to reach, but LinkStash is still far from their level. This release is an MVP, designed with just enough functionality to qualify as a product, and the most I hope for is to create a solid foundation for something better in the future.

That said, LinkStash is a passion project created by a singular developer. Every design choice, every piece of code, and every feature—good or bad—reflects decisions I made. It’s not groundbreaking, but it’s mine—a reflection of me as a developer—and I’m damn proud of what I’ve created. For the product that is created, yes, but more importantly for the journey that I went through with LinkStash.

2024

I’ve been working on and off on this project for about 1 to 1.5 years, but most of the work began in earnest in January 2024. Before LinkStash, I had never completed any hobby project. Sure, I started plenty—everything from a Flutter mobile app and a Unity game to a .NET desktop application, a Go CLI tool, and even a PHP web game. Most of these lie abandoned on a hard drive somewhere. I’d work on them just long enough to enjoy the endorphin rush of learning something new, but as the grind of completing something useful kicked in, my interest would wane.

But LinkStash arrived at just the right time. That’s not to say everything lined up perfectly, and I suddenly had endless time to dedicate to a hobby project. Quite the opposite—2024 turned out to be one of the most challenging years of my life, marked by career, family, health, and financial problems. I’ll spare the details, but there were many sleepless nights where depression loomed over me. The only thing that kept me distracted was working on LinkStash. Instead of lying awake, overwhelmed by my problems, I poured myself into this project.

The sustained focus required when working on LinkStash held back my worries in a way no amount of vegging out to Netflix or gaming could. Saying it saved my life might be a stretch, but it certainly preserved my mental health during those toughest months.

I’ll touch quickly on the developmental side of it.

All these decisions

Building this project alone underscored how much software development truly takes a village. I’ve always known this, but living it really opens your eyes to the scope of the work that just doing development wouldn’t. Even before starting, you have to decide on:

• Architecture
• Versioning
• Design language
• Version control
• Documentation strategy
• Marketing
• Testing
• Scope

A lot of these considerations might seem unnecessary if you’re just building something for yourself. But if your goal is to create something that others will enjoy using, they become critical. Decisions about marketing, documentation, and design aren’t just afterthoughts—they shape how others perceive and interact with your project. These choices often trickle down into your development process, so having a clear approach early on can make a huge difference.

All these things to do

I always believed firmly in the old adage that ‘When you’re done with 90% of the job, you have to finish the rest of the 90%.’ Working in software development, I’ve seen this again and again. But working alone, that is doubly true. You have to do the final push on so many fronts:

• Is the technical documentation ready?
• Is the user documentation ready?
• Is the CICD pipeline ready?
• Is the documentation that’s already done actually still up to date?
• Is the website up?
• Are the release announcements ready?

It also doesnt help that developers often see coding as the “real” work, but projects are bottom-heavy in areas like documentation and release automation. By the time I felt 90% done with the development, the documentation was probably only 30% there, and getting everything else to 100% took far more effort than I expected. I originally aimed to release around my birthdayin late October—I thought it was a fun way to celebrate the occasion—but here I am, finishing in mid-December. Sure, working alone and sporadically might have slowed things down, but the argument stands: all this “other stuff” is critical for a project’s success, and it takes time—more time than we often realize

All those effort. Was it worth it?

Was it worth it? To create something, in this crowded space, that’s objectively worse than others? How do you measure the worth of something? Is it how many people find it useful? Or how many people are using it daily? Sure, both of those are excellent metrics to strive for. For LinkStash, though, I only have one: How many lives it touched? And the target for the KPI for me is 1. Mine.

LinkStash touched my life, walked through some dark times with me hand in hand. It may have taught me something about software development—or not, I’m not sure. But if nothing else happens, if all of this goes into a void and no one ever hears of or uses LinkStash, it would have been worth it.

Don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of plans to keep improving it. But for now, as the curtain falls on 2024, I’m proud to present LinkStash—my small contribution to the world.