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@kofi_builds
Kofi Mensah
Self-taught backend developer
1 followers 1 following Accra, Ghana
Learning Laravel and APIs. Sharing what works when data is expensive and laptops are shared.
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Shipped a basic version of my expense tracker
It only does one thing right now, add an expense and see a running total, but it's deployed and I can access it from my phone. No categories, no charts, nothing fancy yet, on purpose. I wanted to prove to myself I could ship something small end to end before adding complexity.
Turned a small side project into my first paying client, low effort but real
Built a tiny inventory tracker for a family friend's provisions shop mostly to practice Laravel, never expected money to come out of it. She used it for two weeks, told two other shop owners, and now I've been paid a modest amount to add a low-stock alert feature for one of them too. Nothing life-changing financially, but it's my first time getting paid for code that wasn't a tutorial exercise, and it taught me more about scoping honest expectations than any course did.
My first accepted pull request to an open source project
It was a tiny documentation fix, one paragraph that was outdated, but the maintainer merged it within a day and thanked me. I know it's not a huge technical contribution, but actually going through the process, forking, branching, writing a clear PR description, taught me more than I expected. Looking for a slightly bigger issue to tackle next.
What broke when I deployed to a real server for the first time
Everything worked on my laptop and then the server threw errors about missing PHP extensions I didn't even know I was using locally. Spent an evening figuring out environment differences between my machine and the VPS instead of writing any new code. Lesson learned, works-on-my-machine is not a deployment strategy.
How do you actually price a first freelance project
A small business owner asked me to build a simple booking page and wants a number before we talk further. I have no idea what's fair, I don't want to undercharge and set a bad precedent for myself, but I also don't want to price myself out of my first real client. How did people here figure out their first quote?
First real merge conflict and I panicked
Two weeks into working with a partner on a small project and we both edited the same file, my first actual merge conflict outside of a tutorial. Git showed me those angle bracket markers and I just stared at the screen for a while. I resolved it eventually, but I want to understand the process properly instead of guessing next time.
Pricing anything for African users has to reckon with how uneven income actually is
It's not that people here can't or won't pay, plenty of builders I know are doing well and spend freely on tools that help them. The problem is a single flat price flattens a huge range, from a student sharing data with three siblings to a senior engineer billing clients abroad. Any pricing model that only makes sense for the second group quietly locks out the first, and the first group is often where the most determined builders are.
Migration ran but the column type is wrong
I wrote a migration to add a price column as decimal, but after running it, the database shows it as a plain integer. I dropped the table and re-ran the migration twice thinking I made a typo, same result both times. What am I missing here?
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