SS5: Creating and Publishing a QR Code Generator

Release date: 30 Dec 2024

Views: 135

Welcome to a new issue of my weekly newsletter!

First thing's first, I wrote a recap of 2024 and you can check it out on my website. It's titled 2 Years of Being a Software Engineer. Reflecting on your year as a whole is pretty useful.

I recommend you sit down for 15 minutes and write down what you did this year and what would you like to change / focus on going into next year.

Annual plans can be a bit useless because the time frame is very big. But just reflecting and having a general idea of what you would like to focus on might be good.

If you do like planning though, Cal Newport (a well known non-fiction author and professor) instead recommends quarterly plans. And then converting those into weekly and daily tasks so you can make meaningful progress. I'm a fan of this idea as well.

He talks about this in his book Slow Productivity.

If you don't have time to read the book, you can find an explanation video that he published some time ago.

Anyway let's get onto what I got up to this week.

Built this week

Last week I talked about the two ideas I was struggling to choose between.

This week I decided to choose one and pursue it.

I ended up creating a website to generate QR codes. You can find it at qrcodeslab.com.

It's a very simple idea but I think it has a lot of demand. I wanted to create something that I could publish as fast as possible and then make improvements with time.

I managed to publish the first version in a couple of hours. At first, it was a simple input box that you can type into and generate a QR code. Overtime I have made micro improvements like changing the shape and colours.

I plan to continue making these improvements now and hopefully the tool will become better and better.

A lot of alternatives that I find online have either bad UI or paywalls for basic features. I want to provide a service that is free for the most part. In the future it might have paid features but for now this tool will be free for some time.

I plan to grow it through SEO by creating a lot of content on the website.

Before I do that though, I want to keep on adding features and make the functionality really good.

Let's see how that goes.

That is pretty much all the update I have for this week!

Thank you for reading and I hope you found this useful :)

As always, if you have anything you would like to share with me I'm always available via email at [email protected].