I don't really consider the project itself to be objectively cool (it lets you receive files that are too big to send over email directly to your Dropbox folder - you can send files up to 1 GB to me at http://dbinbox.com/cgenco), but it's really cool to me personally because:
* it's the first project I implemented payments through Stripe with (which is an amazingly cool API)
* it's the first side project that's generated enough revenue to quit my day job
* it gives me an active excuse to make other, cooler things that will eventually spin off as their own projects (like a cheaper Mailchimp integrated with Rails on SES)
* it's the first time I've ever needed to scale beyond one server, so I get to learn all about multi-server deployments and keeping your data (on RDS) separate from your app servers separate from your worker servers
* I'm getting really good at chugging through support emails, and thereby email in general. I've got a really nice inbox 0 flow going on that I plan to write about soon
I also now get to work whenever I want, take as much time off as I want, and not overanalyze small purchases because it's likely I'll get a notification from Stripe that I've just received an order of magnitude more money than I'm deliberating over.
I was studying abroad in Australia and didn't bring any flash drives with me. One of the labs (or tutorials, as they call them) had us working on files on the. School computers. I needed to send them to myself somehow, but didn't want to log in to my email or Dropbox to upload them because I didn't feel like the computers were very secure.
I hacked up the first version in a few days and used it for the rest of the semester, then promptly forgot about it until it started getting blogged about :p
I don't really consider the project itself to be objectively cool (it lets you receive files that are too big to send over email directly to your Dropbox folder - you can send files up to 1 GB to me at http://dbinbox.com/cgenco), but it's really cool to me personally because:
* it's the first project I implemented payments through Stripe with (which is an amazingly cool API)
* it's the first side project that's generated enough revenue to quit my day job
* it gives me an active excuse to make other, cooler things that will eventually spin off as their own projects (like a cheaper Mailchimp integrated with Rails on SES)
* it's the first time I've ever needed to scale beyond one server, so I get to learn all about multi-server deployments and keeping your data (on RDS) separate from your app servers separate from your worker servers
* I'm getting really good at chugging through support emails, and thereby email in general. I've got a really nice inbox 0 flow going on that I plan to write about soon
I also now get to work whenever I want, take as much time off as I want, and not overanalyze small purchases because it's likely I'll get a notification from Stripe that I've just received an order of magnitude more money than I'm deliberating over.
It's a blast :D