Hi, I'm Thiago!

Honestly, I re-wrote this paragraph way more times than I'm comfortable admitting — but let’s just say I’d define myself simply as "a software engineer." You know, when you’ve been around long enough, pushing code, going from small CRUD apps to big distributed data processing pipelines with high availability and yada yada yada... it gets hard to explain what you actually do in our beloved field. So, "software engineer" it is. No fancy titles. Like many of you, I push buttons and the machine does stuff.

Well, now that we’re all living in an era ruled by our AI overlords, I found myself with not enough problems to deal with in life. That led me to remember a past conversation I had with my dear friend (also a software engineer) Rian. The conversation was basically us venting about how we’ve never managed to finish the projects we wanted to start together.

We both have our fair share of engineering and even entrepreneurial experience (and have worked together in the past), so it was never about lacking the skills. But somehow, when it came to our own ideas — the personal projects we started outside of our professional work — we never managed to finish them. It’s a familiar story for many engineers, right? Right?! It's like the universe would just rearrange itself to make sure we didn’t finish it. That’s happened with multiple ideas (often brainstormed over a beer, I confess), and even with our YouTube channel, where we made coding tutorials and tech content for a while.

Therefore, I proclaim, enough is enough! I'm teaming up with Rian to get our first mobile app off the ground — and this time, the internet is going to be our accountability partner.

I can’t promise we’ll stream coding sessions live 24/7, but I can promise constant updates about our journey. And if we find anything interesting along the way, you’ll definitely see a post about it.

🏗️ The Project

As you’ve probably guessed, this project is all about getting into the rhythm of building something together. So we’re starting small, with a modest idea. Our goal — and a gift to the r/sideproject subreddit — is to build a habit tracker (that we’ll eventually evolve into a shared accountability tool).

🎯 The Goal

Let’s be honest: there are tons of habit tracker apps out there. It’s a popular project, especially for beginners, because it’s easy to scope. But for us, the real goal here is this series of posts.

We want to build a positive personal brand and digital footprint. If anything else comes out of it — that's a bonus.

🚀 The Plan

To make it happen, we’re starting small: a simple backend and a mobile app. The twist? In the beginning, want to spend as little money as possible, which means we’ll be leaning heavily on free-tier services wherever we can.

Some of the tech stack we’ll probably use:

🤖 Backend:

  • NestJS
  • Swagger
  • PassportJS
  • Prometheus
  • Grafana
  • Prisma

💅 Frontend:

  • React Native (starting with Expo)
  • Axios
  • React Query
  • ECharts
  • Yup

🫦 Other:

  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) free-tier for our cloud setup
  • Supabase (just for the database)
  • Docker for containerization
  • GitHub Container Registry (GHCR) for private container storage

🔍 What We’ll Share Along the Way

Expect unfiltered updates — from architecture decisions (good and bad) to debugging nightmares. If we try something that works well (or blows up spectacularly), we’ll document it. The content will range from deep dives into the tech stack to hot takes on developer tools and cloud services.

Whether it’s "How to deploy on OCI in a potentially 'good enough way'" or "Why Prisma was a mistake (or not)", we’ll share it here.

📍 How You Can Follow the Journey

For now, we’re sticking to dev.to as our main platform.
Every step, challenge, lesson learned, or random thought will land here first (and, maybe in a near future, go to our Youtube channel next?). So follow the page, leave a comment if you want, or just check in once in a while — we’d love the company and support.