[Rest of the content remains the same until the Buildspace paragraph]

Buildspace was a set of guardrails to help me focus, deliver, and iterate on this idea. This aligns with my advice about building something for yourself and learning through doing. In the past, I would just build for building sake and not actually show off what I had done or solicit any feedback with how to improve. Case in point my Website CO2 Emissions Tracker, AI experiments, and several other projects…

[Content continues until the AWS deployment section]

Building out the toy was invaluable to learning more about how to deploy an application to Amazon Web Services (AWS) with SST Ion - a way to quickly build modern full-stack applications on AWS. This was also my first true experience deploying a production-ready app with NextJS to AWS (instead of my go-to, Astro). Having worked with various AWS services and different deployment patterns, learning SST Ion was relatively straightforward - however, there were a few hiccups along the way.

[Rest of the content remains the same until the end]

If you’re interested in learning more about building and shipping projects, check out my posts on practical AI applications, AWS deployments, and advice for new developers. And if you want to help craft the future of In Short, please reach out to me.