In this episode, James Perkins talks about the SaaS he built, Roll Your Tweet, the tech behind it, and how much it costs to run.

SponsorsVercel

Vercel combines the best developer experience with an obsessive focus on end-user performance. Their platform enables frontend teams to do their best work. It is the best place to deploy any frontend app. Start by deploying with zero configuration to their global edge network. Scale dynamically to millions of pages without breaking a sweat.

For more information, visit Vercel.com

ZEAL is hiring!

ZEAL is a computer software agency that delivers “the world’s most zealous” and custom solutions. The company plans and develops web and mobile applications that consistently help clients draw in customers, foster engagement, scale technologies, and ensure delivery.

ZEAL believes that a business is “only as strong as” its team and cares about culture, values, a transparent process, leveling up, giving back, and providing excellent equipment. The company has staffers distributed throughout the United States, and as it continues to grow, ZEAL looks for collaborative, object-oriented, and organized individuals to apply for open roles.

For more information visit softwareresidency.com/careers

DatoCMS

DatoCMS is a complete and performant headless CMS built to offer the best developer experience and user-friendliness in the market. It features a rich, CDN-powered GraphQL API (with realtime updates!), a super-flexible way to handle dynamic layouts and structured content, and best-in-class image/video support, with progressive/LQIP image loading out-of-the-box."

For more information, visit datocms.com

Show Notes

• 0:00 Introduction
• 1:01 Introducing James Perkins
  • Tina CMS
• 1:53 Parenting Tips
• 3:51 Quick Rants: "No one is going to give you a tech job or development job based on social media process"
• 5:43 Quick Rant: Educational Content is better within a Blog Post
• 8:28 Roll Your Tweet
  • Roll Your Tweet
• 10:35 Why is not intimidating to build a SaaS app and what tech stack are you using?
  • Feed Hive
  • Next.js
  • Clerk
  • Planet Scale
  • Prisma
  • Send in Blue
  • Render
• 16:57 Sponsor: DatoCMS
• 17:51 Question: Should you go ahead and build out the Payments piece early or wait until you actually have sign-ups?
  • Paddle
• 22:59 What prompted the change in the tech stack?
• 24:00 How do you run the cron job?
  • Crossover episode with Web Dev Weekly
• 26:54 Working with the Database
• 30:43 Sponsor: Vercel
• 31:50 Developing By Yourself
• 36:41 The Cost of Running Roll Your Tweet
• 40:59 Sponsor: ZEAL
• 41:53 Grab Bag Questions
• 41:58 Question #1: What are you using for the analytics in your app?
  • Plausible
• 44:19 Question #2: Do you stream your work on your SaaS?
• 44:56 Question #3: Will you repeat your tech stack one more time?
• 46:43 Finding James Perkins Online
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • Twitch