Starting from scratch (and why that's terrifying)
The first week of any project is always the most daunting. You're staring at a blank screen, and every decision feels like it could come back to haunt you later. Should I use Rails or something else? What about hosting? How do I handle photos?
I've been thinking about building LetAdmin for months, but this week I finally committed. No more planning, no more "I'll start next week"—just get something working that letting agencies could actually use.
The boring bits that matter most
Here's what nobody tells you about building software: the exciting features come later. Week one is all about the foundation—the stuff that users will never see but absolutely have to work. I spent most of the week on things like:
Getting deployment sorted. I chose Heroku because honestly, I don't want to spend my time managing servers. Letting agencies certainly don't want to hire a DevOps engineer just to run their property software. One click deploy, automatic SSL certificates, done. Sometimes the best technical decision is the one that lets you forget about it.
Photo storage that just works. Properties need photos. Lots of them. I integrated AWS S3 early because I learned the hard way (on a previous project) that storing images on application servers is a terrible idea. They fill up your disk, they're slow to serve, and backing them up is a nightmare. With S3, photos are safe, fast, and agencies can upload as many as they need without me worrying about storage costs spiraling.
A decent interface without starting from zero. I'm a developer, not a designer. Building a professional-looking dashboard from scratch would take months. So I used TailAdmin—a pre-built dashboard template that looks clean and works brilliantly on mobile. Now the system looks credible from day one, and I can focus on features that actually help agencies rather than tweaking button colors.
What agencies actually get from all this
If you're running a letting agency, you probably don't care that I chose Rails 8 or that photos live on S3. What you care about is: can I add properties quickly? Will photos load fast for prospective tenants? Can I access this on my phone between viewings?
The answer to all three is yes, and that's what this week was about. Building a foundation that means:
- Fast property pages. Photos load quickly because they're served from CloudFront (Amazon's global CDN), not a single server somewhere.
- Mobile-friendly everything. The interface adapts to any screen size, so you can manage properties from your phone without squinting.
- No surprises. Secure authentication means staff accounts are protected. Automated tests mean new features won't break existing ones. Heroku means the system just... works.
What I learned
The hardest part of this week wasn't the technical work—it was resisting the urge to build features. I kept wanting to jump ahead and build inspection forms or landlord management or automated emails. But I forced myself to get the foundations right first.
It's boring. It's not impressive. But it means everything I build next week (and every week after) will be on solid ground.
Next week: actually building something agencies can see. Properties, basic CRUD operations, maybe some filtering. The fun stuff.