--- layout: post title: "Zap-It ⚡: Product mindset in action" excerpt: > Leverage a "product mindset" to pick side projects, minimizing output and maximing impact. Here we build a minimal URL-to-RSS web-app and its iOS client. categories: [articles] related: - _micros/pocket.md --- ### The product mindset If you are like me, you'll feel a constant _tension_ between all those new cool side-projects ideas you have and the other things competing for your time/attention (work™, for instance). I find it pretty useful to filter things off through a _product mindset_ to decide what to do next. This blog post tells how I leverage such mindset. Typically, things (aka "product discovery") go through a feedback loop: 1. Identify one or more opportunities (find users' pain). 1. Prototype a minimal solution and test it. 1. Gather feedbacks and iterate. In most cases, side projects ideas will sparkle from _my own pain_. _I_ will be the early adopter, but also the builder. "Business"-like pressure comes from the limited time I have to work on side things. This means I need to minimize how much I invest (_output_, time, lines of code, architectural stack), while maximizing _impact_. Doing just bare minimum to solve the perceived pain. ### The opportunity: Quickly save things for later I love reading blog posts and web articles, and I love doing it through RSS feeds. Sometimes, I'll find a promising (but _long_) read on the web. I'd like to _store_ it somewhere so that I can read it later. And I'd like to do it _quickly_, from my phone. There are a lot of archival/bookmarking tools out there that do that. For instance, I have self-hosted [Wallabag](https://www.wallabag.it/en) for a while. I could use the iOS Wallabag app to add new entries for later and then consume them through Wallabag's RSS feed. So far, so good. The problem was that performance was _abysmal_. I experienced _tail latencies_ of 60 seconds or more when adding new items. Worse, the UI of its iOS mobile app would be _blocked_ for that long, waiting for server-side confirmation. ### A minimal solution: URLs to RSS entries The bad I/O of the machine hosting Wallabag was most likely what caused my troubles with it. As Wallabag receives a new item, it fetches its content, process it, and make it available for reading. All this happens on a foreground process that, on the hardware where I was running it, was really _slow_! Thinking more about this, I realized I didn't really need to do things _synchronously_. In fact, most times I'll save something and read it only after a _lot_ of time has passed. In addition, [Miniflux](https://miniflux.app) -- the feed reader I use -- provides [support to "Fetch original content](https://miniflux.app/features.html#content-manipulation)" through background workers. So, a minimal but good solution that works for me only needs to: - Map URLs to RSS feed entries. - Provide an iOS client. - Be _quick_! Miniflux will take care of the rest by consuming the feed entries, fetching them, and making them available to [clients](https://reederapp.com). ### Zap-It ⚡ Here comes [Zap-It ⚡](https://github.com/aldur/zap-it): I saw the opportunity to build something _very small_ that does one thing only, but does it well. Zap-It reads web entries (a `link` and a `title`) from a REST API, stores them in a `sqlite` database, and serves through an RSS feed. That's all! Even on a potato-powered machine, it runs fast enough. This philosophy makes it minimal and doesn't reinvent the wheel. For instance, Zap-It doesn't implement access control, but delegates it to existing and battle-tested solutions (the [GitHub README](https://github.com/aldur/zap-it) provides a few examples). Full disclosure -- I confess that I also _wanted_ to build this to: - Experiment with Rust (obligatory 🦀) - Start learning [Nix](https://nixos.org) (what all cool kids use these days) ### E2E delivery: iOS shortcuts You might be thinking: > OK, that's definitely minimal. But what about the iOS client? Here comes [Apple Shortcuts](https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/shortcuts/welcome/ios) -- poor men's iOS client. In short, shortcuts let users build small programs through a no-code UI. They provide different integrations, they accessible from the iOS share sheet, and can take what's currently on-screen as an input. All this makes shortcuts _perfect_ to build small, context-aware, clients interacting with light APIs. The UX is also pretty good too -- sometimes better than native apps. It's easier to show than tell: {:.text-align-center} ![Using an iOS shortcut to save one of the articles of this blog.](../images/zap-it.gif){:.centered} _The pleasure of seeing it run, and run fast!_ You can find the resulting shortcut [here](https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/83d641e49edc41858210d87f4eca6c33). ### Wrapping things up (and looking back) Building Zap-It took time, of course. It would have been faster for me to code it in Python instead of Rust/Nix. But there's pleasure in learning new things too and not everything must be optimized. Looking back, I should have spent a little more time at the design board. For instance, the first iteration didn't require a `title`, but would render entries through their raw URL in the feed reader -- not nice. Thinking about outcome instead: so far, Zap-It serves me well. I use it multiple times per day. It's fast, and its UX doesn't get in the way. The iOS shortcut works well and it's reliable. More importantly, it is a _finished_ side project. It is minimal but has all I need. While building it, I had such a goal in mind. Focus on the end-to-end flow, don't get bogged down in technical rabbit holes, think about impact. I think that went pretty well!