Founder Check Ins

Tinkering Away

Welcome to my dream platform for job orchestration in dotnet! Didact is my dream, my love letter to data engineering and the dotnet community. I have been tinkering away on slowly building Didact for two years. Wow... I have to let that sink in as I write this.

Two years of working through the most utterly complex, mind-bogglingly contorted set of software applications I have ever attempted to architect. Please take my word for it: building a job orchestrator, let alone building one solo and bootstrapped as I am, is borderline insane - probably positively insane in my case.

Unless you try to build a job orchestrator yourself, it's difficult to describe with appropriate accuracy how incredibly challenging this endeavour really is.

Which got me thinking...

Radio Silent

Most people don't know how difficult it is to build a job orchestrator. The sheer complexity of shipping a fullstack platform, complete with a web dashboard, REST API, execution engine, CLI, documentation, and not just making it, but making it (commercial) open source and open to the world around you is a tall order.

Meanwhile, I've interacted with countless people on Reddit and other forums, and I even have a list of early adopter emails and messages of various individuals who have expressed interest in this platform these past two years.

That is aboslutely wonderful and makes me overjoyed that people are interested in Didact, especially since I am trying to sustain and monetize it long-term. And since I'm solo, bootstrapped, and am constantly struggling with the burder of balancing marketing and building, I realized that I have a bad habit of going radio silent on you all for long periods at a time.

Struggles of Bootstrapping

Please, please know that it is not intentional - it is just extremely difficult to balance working a day job and simultaneously building a platform of this immense a scope by oneself. Not to mention, my personal health has taken a back seat these past several years, and for the past year and a half I have been aggressively taking it back through intense fitness.

It is extremely frustrating to have been building this platform for two years and not have a working version ready yet (though thankfully that is right around the corner), so hopefully you can understand my position that I feel I need to stop yapping, double my time building, and ship you a working v0 product.

I'm tired of building in isolation, darn it: I want Didact in your hands.

Check Ins

If you've read this far along, I want to thank you. Hopefully you can understand some of my frustrations and difficulties and can empathize with building and launching an open core business solo and bootstrapped like I am doing. This path is not for the faint of heart, that's for sure.

But while I am doubled down building, I do nonetheless want to speak with you more frequently. I've been mulling over how to best accomplish this for the past few weeks, and what I think I've settled on is doing little weekly or biweekly founder "check ins" with you for a while.

I don't want to overdue it (like I usually do) and feel the need to make some ten minute YouTube video or write some essay-length blog update. Instead, I just want to give you a short little update every week or two.

"Here's what I'm working on", "here's why", "here's what's next", updates on target dates, and so on. I'm thinking just short little blog posts, 60-120 second YouTube shorts, things like that.

I have learned so much in building, rebuilding, and refining Didact just in these past two years. My developer knowledge has quite literally 100x from where I was two years ago. But I lament the fact that I have no diary, no consistent tweet history, no history of blog posts detailing the journey and how far I and Didact have come these past two years.

I wish I could go back in time and change that, but like I said above - it's really hard balancing all of this yourself in the early days when you're solo and bootstrapped.

Where To Find Me

So while I can't change the past, I want to try this out and set some better communication habits going forward.

I would really love for you to see these little check ins and tune in for my short updates, so here's where you can find me:

• The best place will be this blog on the Didact marketing site.
• The next best place will be the Didact YouTube channel where I plan to post little YouTube shorts updates.
• I also have some dedicated socials for quick updates, mainly Twitter/X and BlueSky.

I also have my personal Twitter/X profile where I post updates which is a great place to keep up with me and Didact.

Please do follow or subscribe to these accounts if you don't already, or at the least check these blog posts every so often.

T-Minus

Hang tight, v0 is nearly here. And once it is, I will desperately want your feedback on the platform.

I can't wait to build this platform out for you, and I'm looking forward to chatting with you more often.

Talk soon!

-Daniel, Founder of Didact