The Problem
In March of 2020, right before the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns began in California, my wife and I purchased a new pop-up camper. We were ecstatic and couldn’t wait to spend the following weekend (my birthday) at the beautiful Carlsbad State Beach Campground. Lo and behold, a few days prior to starting our first family adventure with our 1 year old son, California got shutdown and our epic camping adventure was put on pause until further notice. Thankfully, throughout 2020, we were able to go camping with our new pop-up camper four or five times.
Fast forward to January 2021, things are still pretty unpredictable. Currently, California State Park Campgrounds are shut down but my wife continues to search for available future campsites, which depending on where you look, can be very difficult to find. As an up and coming web developer, I figured this would be the perfect opportunity to try and tackle a real world problem, which is finding out when reservations for booked campsites become available. Many times, families that book campsites through Reserve California end up cancelling for one reason or another. Camping enthusiasts continually search the website scanning for reservations that may become available so that they can book them. After discussing my new idea with my wife, she informed me that a camper Facebook group that she is a part of currently uses a service called Campnab. After checking out the website and seeing what they had to offer, I was impressed. They solved the very problem that I was looking to solve and turned it into a SAAS business. After feeling a little bit discouraged, since I thought that I was the only person in the world who came up with a way to solve this problem, I decided to get over it and try to build the thing anyways.
In one of the podcasts that I listen to frequently, the Indie Hackers Podcast, Courtland Allen interviews ambitious “indie hackers” who are turning their ideas and side projects into profitable online businesses. One thing he consistently talks about in his interviews is how many founders give up after finding out that a company already exists for a problem that needs to be solved. Although this is currently just a project that I’m working on for family/friends, I thought that it might be possible to eventually turn it into a business. Anyways, this post isn’t necessarily supposed to be about the “why”, but I thought providing some context as to why I’m building this might be interesting for anyone who is reading this. I’m not going to provide all the details and specifics about how I’m currently building the application, but I wanted to continually document some things as I progress.
The Stack
I’m still learning all about web development, but I’ve decided to use something similar to the MERN stack to build out this application.
Back End: Node JS
Front End: React (Gatsby or Next JS)
I’m thinking that I want to utilize Google Firebase as a service to help with some of the things I don’t necessarily want to deal with in this application. They will be able to take care of a lot of the heavy lifting so that I can actually focus on building the product:
- Authentication
- Hosting
- Scaling
- Database Layer
- Serverless Functions
I’ve been working on and off on the backend over the past month to try to get the data that I need from the Reserve California website, and I feel like I’m almost there, but I’m running into a couple of road blocks. This post doesn’t necessarily include anything technical, but I wanted to start somewhere and document my journey as I build out this project. I’m going to try to post at least once every two weeks on my blog for anyone that is interested in following along. I still want to re-build my website from scratch since I haven’t touched it in a few years, but I think blogging about my progress with this project will be important. Thanks for reading!
