Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
Show HN: I rewrote an inventory app 4 times over 5 years before releasing v1 (upzonehq.com)
11 points by florentmsl 113 days ago
I’ve been building for 5 years.

I rewrote it 4 times (Blazor Server -> Blazor WASM + Asp backend -> React + Node -> Ruby on Rails - Ruby and Rails are both awesome btw.) and kept telling myself I was “improving the architecture” when I was really avoiding release. I also spun up a few side projects in that period and shipped none of them.

This is the first one I finally pushed live.

It’s Upzone, an inventory app for ecommerce warehouse teams: receiving, bin locations, pick/pack/ship workflows, and Shopify/Amazon/... sync. Built on Rails 8, which has been genuinely great to work with. A QuickBooks integration is also coming

If you run ops or warehouse workflows, I’d love literally any kind of feedback:

https://upzonehq.com
2 comments
tankmohit11 111 days ago
Can you please share what kind of issues you have faced with each tech stack choice and how the next one resolved it?

The reason I am asking because recently after getting tired of plumbing different npm packages I decided to use blazor server with dotnet 10 to leverage high quality first party packages (e.g. efcore, identity etc) to build a product. I am halfway there, sometimes I miss React & Typescript due to enterprisey nature of dotnet but AI helps me to overcome it. So far doing well with it.

link
florentmsl 111 days ago
I think nowadays they are perfectly fine. Blazor Server had lots of disconnects because our customers typically don't have a stable Wi-Fi connection. Blazor WASM had next to no tooling. It was dotnet 5 or 6, so still very early on the WASM journey of dotnet, not much or no documentation and no AI to overcome initial hurdles.

tbh I sometimes miss React & TS too, for the frontend React is just straightforward, and TS is no bad language at all

link
Dexter74 113 days ago
Why didn’t you release the first versions? Was the tech really that bad?
link
florentmsl 113 days ago
To be honest, in retrospect I should have released the first version. But as an engineer, I got stuck fixing things and adding features because I thought, “otherwise no one will use it.” While adding features, I realized I needed to change the tech stack in order to move faster and add more functionality more efficiently. In the end, I’m happy with Rails, but I should have released years ago.
link