Step Into My Breadbox, A Tale of Money Lost and Knowledge Gained

Before starting with Obtiva a bit ago, I started a toy project called Breadbox. It was a project started mostly out of necessity. At the time I was freelancing and didn’t want to pay a monthly rate for invoicing software, so I did what software devs do… I built it. The project evolved slightly as it started moving toward a platform that I could sell as a service myself. I thought I really had something going because at the time there wasn’t many players in that space besides Blinksale & Freshbooks. Unfortunatly, while I was plugging away at building my very own piece of software as a service history… some new players came around. There were many but the ones closes to my work were Ballpark & Curdbee.

Curdbee, I felt, was my biggest contendor as at the time they were closest in featureset and had the same idea of free/very low priced options. Although Ballpark frustrated the crap out of me. They had design to drool over and many features I had ‘invented’ in my head. I guess there probably isn’t a lot reinvention going on in the simple invoicing space but I thought they were good ideas and Ballpark was already on their way to implementation. This was frustrating but and I wanted to give up many times but kept plugging away.

Breadbox served my purposes well and I ate my own dogfood right up until today. I’ve realized that I just don’t have the time to put into the project anymore and would like to make sure you all know there is a decent project out there to dive into.

There are many reasons i’m writing to you today. The two main reasons are as follows.

I want Breadbox to have a good home. It has been been open-sourced for a while but I don’t really advertise that. I feel there is a good codebase of clean code and also many pitfalls, but I learned A LOT along the way. I’m hoping that some developer hunting for a project to work on might take a look and give Breadbox a little love

I want to share my experience with anyone that will listen. There are so many stories of success but hardly any of failure, or at the very least, failure to launch. Even though I did not attain my goal of launching a service to make some extra cash with, I gained a wealth of knowledge that as I look back was invaluable. So on the surface it may appear a failure, for me, it was a huge success. Devs in general, but mostly the more green developer, out there need to understand that there will be sooooo many projects that you start and throw away… and that’s OK. Throw them away and then start all over again. The nice thing about code is that you can always write it again with your newly gained experience.