Today I woke up and decided to push ruff-registrar live, it's been kicking around in my head for a week or so actually, so it's not entirely out of nowhere, but something inside of me said "today is the day".
It has been a journey, sparked by a conversation between my wife and I about how insecure the system one of our homeschool co-ops uses for registration and I said (with much bravado), "I bet I can do a better job than that in a month!".
Checking my notes and git commits, it's been almost exactly a year since the initial commit (July 14th 2025) so I'm right there, in the ballpark 😊
The standalone product, an open source student registration system was technically built in about 2 or 3 months, but access to increasingly powerful large language models tempted me to try to turn it into an enterprise level product, and that's where the rest of the time went.
There is a lot of talk online about whether AI is really a game changer or not, and to me the proof is in the pudding. While most folks have been asking the question and wondering, some of us have been quietly building. That's really only one way to answer the question.
I can say without any doubt that ruff registrar as a product would only exist in my head as something nice to do "when I have some free time". At best I would have completed the community edition and shared it with some friends, maybe step in to replace the legacy app I mentioned earlier, but I definitely never would have had the time to launch it as a SaaS offering.
The biggest takeaway I learned from this experience of going from idea to launching a product is the amount of time and effort that goes into it. I used to think that me not being able to launch any of my solo efforts in the past was purely a skill issue, but now I understand that I had the skills all along.
I just didn't appreciate how much work it would be, I was looking at the foothills and finding those daunting without even seeing the mountain peaks soaring behind them.