I Thought I Was Building a Website. It Became Something Much Bigger.

A few months ago I decided to stop hiding my work on my hard drive and build a place for it.
That became Cordinant.
It's still very much a work in progress.

When I started, I thought I was building a simple website to showcase a couple of products. Instead, I found myself creating a custom CMS, a blog, product pages, SEO tools, and a growing list of features that I keep adding one by one. Every time I cross something off the list, I seem to discover three more things I'd like to build.

In a way, Cordinant has become another product alongside the software I'm creating.

I'm a solo creator with a full-time job, so progress is steady rather than fast. Some evenings I write code, other evenings I work on documentation, improve the UI, or write articles. More recently, AI has become part of that workflow. I use it to explore ideas, review code, improve documentation, challenge my thinking, and help me move faster. It saves me time, but it definitely doesn't replace the work. Almost everything still needs testing, editing, and a lot of rewriting.

One decision I made early on was to build self-hosted software instead of SaaS.
I realized that, as one person, I couldn't realistically provide the kind of continuous hosting, customer support, and maintenance that a SaaS product deserves. Building software that people can download, own, customize, and run on their own servers felt like a much better fit for the way I work.
Right now I'm building two products:

• My Budget — a self-hosted personal finance application built with PHP and MySQL.
• Captain's Toolkit — an offline-first toolkit for boat owners with an optional PHP backend.

Building the software is only half the challenge. I'm also learning how to create a website people enjoy visiting, write content worth reading, improve SEO, prepare product pages, and somehow make people discover all of it.
I'm not here because I've figured everything out. Quite the opposite.
I'm here to build, learn, share the journey, and hopefully meet other people who are doing the same.

I'd love to see what everyone else is working on.