Hey everyone! How’s everyone doing on this weekend? Well, honestly for me, this is the first weekend in a really long while that I actually don’t really have something to stress about (as in school projects or freelance project work). As some of you are aware already, I had been taking a one-year part-time post-diploma course in UX Design & Management. And for about a year, most of my weekends have been spent stressing about my school assignments. Because each module only has about 2 months (more accurately, 6 weeks), I had to spend every single weekend working on my assignments or I won’t have enough time to complete them. Well, that and during the first 6 months of studying, I was also working full-time in a job. So yeah, well, at least financially-wise, I was in a better place.

So, roughly 6 weeks ago, right around the same time as my final school project began, my current freelance client approached me with a freelance project opportunity. This freelance client is also a former employer that I had worked with in 2024. I spent about a month working for him as a part-time QA engineer. And then after that we parted ways when I found that full-time job. Knowing about my current financial challenges and the increased responsibilities that I am facing, he approached me and offered me a chance to help build a PageBuilder that he hopes to integrate into his existing web product, it’s basically a Software-as-a-Service Platform (SaaS). His only requirement for me was that it has to be something like Unlayer.

Actually you know something guys, I wrote precisely about my entire journey on my dev.to profile. Go check it out. It’s been a really long time since my days as a featured technical writer that I’ve written something as substantive as this. It felt good. I feel really proud of what I have written yesterday.

My First Free Weekend in a While

So that is where I am right this very moment. Now that my first freelance project (first in a few years) is near completion and delivery, I found myself wondering what to do with my weekend. I have no school assignment nor a project-related deadline to worry about.

Initially, I did consider maybe not doing anything. Just spend my entire weekend playing some PC games, do anything else but think about work-related, or development related stuff. Basically, being brain-dead. That’s what I mean. But after everything I have gone through these last few years of my life, after all the struggles and things I have experienced, doing absolutely nothing meaningful with my time just doesn’t sit right with me. Everytime that I look back on my journey and life, some of my biggest regrets actually came from the time that I had but I didn’t make the most of it to pursue or work on the things that I wished I had. It’s time that I could never get back, no matter how much I’ve regretted it.

So, instead of not doing anything productive, or meaningful this weekend, I’ve chosen to focus my time on doing something that might actually mean something (maybe in time to come).

Satori: PageBuilder Docs Portal

So, trying to work on the documentation for my freelance project, I was feeling frustrated that the available automation tools for turning the JSDocs into HTML-friendly version wasn’t doing exactly what I wanted. Instead, I was getting stuff that just doesn’t feel professional or dev-friendly. Then I began to have this idea and inspiration, “What if I decided to build my very own documentation portal?”

Vision/Ideation

In my vision, I was picturing this nice website where I was promoting and selling a UI plugin called “Satori PageBuilder”. If you have ever used premium PageBuilders in the form of WordPress plugins, then you might be familiar with what I am talking about. The goal is quite similar. I imagined having my own website where I would be selling the Satori PageBuilder as a ready-made, plug-and-play kind of UI tool that developers, bloggers and seriously website builders can use. Maybe pay a $175 per year subscription, and then they can have everything. Maybe I might even expand the options to include a “Premium Subscription” where they can have access to priority tech support too.

Always Start Simple, Start Small

As I began thinking more about this vision and idea that I had, the first thing that came to my mind is, I need to first sit down with my freelance client. After all, to be fair and respectful, he was the one who first came to me with this project idea. It was his idea to want to build a PageBuilder for his business and product. It wouldn’t be right for me to just take this on and run with it without first consulting with him. If I have his okay, then maybe I can start thinking about the possibility of monetizing it in the near future. Perhaps once the PageBuilder itself is more stable (somewhere along the v1.* timeframe). Right now, for version one, there is still plenty of key features that I feel need to be included before we can sell the PageBuilder to potential users.

Besides, as someone that has been using professional PageBuilders for many years, I also know that the best way to truly convince potential power users to invest in a good PageBuilder is if the PageBuilder itself is truly good. When a PageBuilder is truly good, it can almost always sell itself. That is the goal that I have in my mind.

First, we start simple. And that will begin with me working on a documentations (or “docs” for short) portal. This documentations portal will include stuff like “Welcome” page, “Getting Started”, “User Guide”, “How-tos”, “Known Issues”, and then we have “API reference” section at the bottom.

As you can see above, I’ve already began laying the groundwork yesterday. First the logo, and then now, the navigation panel on the left side. Then last night, I also started to create the database tables and also seeding some of the records. Basically, what I have been doing was with the help of GPT-4.1, I began turning the interfaces, components and types into database-friendly records and inserting them into the relevant tables.

My current plan is simple. I don’t wish to overengineer the UI, or the features for the API reference, and even later on when I start moving over to the Getting Started, User Guide sections. The goal here is to take a set of different entities (i.e. Components, Component Prop Interfaces, Interfaces, and so on), and then I would start working on generating some sample API reference contents. That is also where I will be continuing my work today.

Choosing Not to Live With Anymore Regrets

I apologise to my otherwise non-technical readers/subscribers. I hope this hasn’t been too boring or anything. If there is anything you ought to know about me is that I have lived with plenty of regrets in my life for a long time. Things I wished I had the courage to do, or things I should have done when I had the chance, but I didn’t because I thought I would have the time to do it later on.

Well, no more. I’m saying no more to living with that sort of regrets. As soon as I recognized what this free weekend means for me, I knew that I have a choice. I could’ve wasted the weekend doing a bunch of less than meaningful activities, or I could seize this moment to start working on something that I know could have a potentially meaningful outcome in the months and years to come.

How has your weekend been my friends? I sincerely hope that you are doing better than I am.

P.S. Part of the reason why I am choosing to make the most of my first free weekend is also because it helps to keep my ADHD mind from running wild, and also it helps to keep my chronic anxiety at bay. If I have too much free time, I would begin to dwell on all the things that I can’t seem to control, or do anything about in this very immediate moment. There are things I simply cannot change with a snap of my fingers. So, instead of worrying about those issues that I can’t change, I’m going to focus on what I can actually do.