I’ve been working on a side project off and on for five years (since before COVID). I’m building a web app, Arqstar, that helps community HOAs take a paperwork-heavy process and move it into the digital world.

I’ve been working on this for so long:

• It started as a Node / JavaScript project, just backend 😅 - going all in on serverless
• I converted it to a Node / TypeScript project, still serverless, still just the backend 😳
• Migrated DynamoDB to Postgres SQL
• I converted it to a Java Spring Boot project, with Docker, still the backend 😭
• I bootstrapped a React front-end
• I converted the front-end to NextJS
• I launched a landing page on Mailchimp
• AI / LLM as coding assistants arrived in a big way and so I rewrote my landing page with a lot of assistance with just HTML and Firebase in two nights

This is kind of insanity mixed with my own little hell. Arqstar’s evolution, from a tech stack standpoint, mirrored what I was working with at my full-time gig, so it hasn’t been worthless, right? A lot of what I worked on has helped me progress as a modern software developer.

Here I am, in 2025, and I’m going to release just enough of Arqstar to show it to prospective customers and, finally, validate my idea. At least I’ll get comfortable with something I’m not entirely comfortable with, prospecting & selling.

In the interest of probably putting the cart before the horse, here’s Arqstar.

Arqstar is the all-in-one solution for managing architectural requests in your community.

Arqstar.com

I’ll have some lessons that come from this, for sure. For now, I look forward to seeing this to it’s conclusion.

🧇