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It's hard to believe I started steem.supply just 30 days ago. In a very short time window, the project really took off the ground and, according to Google Analytics, it has been used by more than 500 users so far.

It went from 1 feature: getting the totals of the potential rewards for a user, to a pretty complex one page app (although it doesn't look, under the hood there's quite a lot going on). It now shows the comments rewards as well, it takes into account posts with declined payouts and posts with split rewards, it shows some interesting breakdowns of the data (potential growth, posts versus comments earnings) and so on.

I'm going to outline - very briefly - 3 things that are worth taking from this pet-project-turned-into-a-full-fledged-one-page-app.

1. Doing Is Learning

One of the reasons I started steem.supply was to learn more about the quirks of blockchain programming, specifically about the graphene blockchain (the one that powers not only Steemit, but also BitShares and PeerPlays). There's a slightly different paradigm in coding on top of a blockchain and there was a lot to ingest. One of the biggest benefits of this project is that I learned tremendously, creating my own PHP-based tools for it (PHP is not very popular amongst blockchain programmers and I find this a bit surprising, given the popularity of the language - read: the number of developers who already know it - and the fact that it features modern libraries, like websockets clients, just as well as Python).

2. Feedback Is Critical

One of the biggest challenges for a programmer is "working in a silo", or being isolated and now knowing exactly how to develop his products. Most of the time, we work with assumptions, imagining what the end user will do and how the app will be used. By starting the app in a very basic form and just listening to people as they started using it, I was able to build something that's actually useful, beyond my own little agenda of learning the quirks of blockchain programming.

3. One Step At A Time

My current big project is steem.city (some of you may already know that). But I just know I can't build it over night. It will need many small steps until it reaches a usable form. Working for steem.supply gave me a little bit of perspective on that. Since the user input in steem.city is significantly bigger and the app will be an order of magnitude more complicated than steem.supply, I expect it to take more than one month until it reaches a stable form. The initial launch is still set up for July 10th, when I hope I will have a minimum viable product, but I don't expect it to be fully operational earlier than 2-4 months.

All in all, working for steem.supply was a lot of fun and I'm stoked to see that more than 500 Steemians are already using it, some of them even compulsively (I'm one of those people, to be honest) and I'm happy to see I built something that gives a bit of value to other people.

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This post is part of a 30 days writing challenge. The rules and the goals of the challenge are here. If you want to join, it's worth knowing that will upsteem (with full power) at least 3 articles form this challenge each day.

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I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.

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You can also vote for me as witness here:
https://steemit.com/~witnesses