A Week as an Indie Developer: This Time I Actually Started Building Projects

Preface

Hi everyone, I'm Xiyuan.

A few months ago, I quietly changed the bios of both my WeChat official accounts to "indie developer."

See these two posts for details:

• May 20, 2025, Xiyuan Life, A Brand New Journey
• Xiyuan Code, Setting Out Anew

And yet it wasn't until November 2025 that I actually started building projects……🤣

It's only now that I've realized time management is truly a skill.

Too many things I want to do in my head, far too little time to actually do them.

So this week I decided: I'll try writing a simple post every week to keep a record.

I also hope this series can keep me company as I slowly bring these ideas down to earth.

Keywords This Week

AirPad, slacking off, filing, pitfalls, Taro, too many ideas

Project Work

This week I started development on two projects. Here's a quick rundown of progress.

AirPad

AirPad's goal is to let any device work as a game controller—handhelds (like my Odin 2, Steam Deck, and similar), even phones and tablets, plus any other gadgets you can think of.

Why this project?

The use cases may not be many, but it's a need I actually ran into.

A while back at a gathering with friends, I pulled out some Steam party games ready for an all-out showdown.

The awkward part was that some friends didn't have controllers. They don't usually play PC games, so asking them to buy a controller just for a gathering wasn't realistic.

But phones? Everyone has one.

If a phone could instantly become a controller, wouldn't that solve it perfectly?

Progress

After some technical research confirmed it was feasible, I got to work right away.

I've now finished the first version of the MVP, and testing on my Odin 2 handheld feels incredibly smooth 😄

There should be similar products on the market, but mine wins by not requiring an app install, with good compatibility—in theory, any device with a browser can be used as a controller.

It already meets my own needs.

If anyone's interested, I'll seriously consider turning it into a proper product.

Project Y (working codename)

I don't want to spoil too much about this one yet, so I'll just call it "Project Y" for now.

I can only share three things:

• It's a mini program
• It's related to "slacking off"
• I'm really looking forward to it going live 😏

This week I got all the tedious paperwork done—filing, verification, and so on.

There was a little episode when applying for filing:

When I submitted it in the system the name was fine, but after a while platform review called and said my app name duplicated some company's product. I searched for ages and couldn't find that product or trademark……

Luckily I renamed it once and the filing went through smoothly 😓

Honestly, the environment in China is really not very friendly to individual developers.

The paperwork is way too tedious. To ship an app, writing code is actually the easiest part 🤣

Later, to list it on app stores, I'll also need to apply for software copyright, which takes several months as well.

So when working on a project, you have to start applying from the moment you conceive it—by the time development is done, it still might not have come through.

As for Project Y itself, this week I mainly got the technical framework in place.

At the current pace, in theory it could be done in November……

In theory……😅

One more complaint:

I started with the Taro4 + Vite + Tailwind combo, and ran into all kinds of weird compatibility issues.

The official docs are still stuck on 3.x. I got dizzy looking things up.

In the end I just rolled back to Taro3 + Webpack. It's old, but if it works well enough, that's fine.

Taro4: "The lack of stability is the biggest bug."

Ideas

Daily Journal App

Another little idea popped up this week:

Build a Weibo-style daily journal app that can also auto-generate weekly recaps.

The moment I thought of it I froze for a second—

Well damn, isn't this one of the "programmer's holy trinity"? 🤣

But looking at it another way—so many people want to build this?

That means the need really exists, and the use case is solid.

It's not about making money, but about making everyday life more traceable.

Next Week's Plans

• Get Project Y's main screens built
• Finish Granian/Celery integration for the DjangoStarter project
• Watch movies
• Reassess whether to use AI for some improvements

Random Notes

Exercise

The pull-up bar I bought last week finally got put to use.

Back in secondary school, every day after class I'd hang out with classmates at the high bars and parallel bars.

We'd compete at pull-ups.

I'd often do ten or twenty in a row.

After years of no exercise, I could only manage 2 on the first try 🤣

But after a week of consistent training, I can now do 8 with imperfect form.

Keep it up 💪

Phone Downgrade

On Thursday I went to the vivo service center and downgraded my three-year-old iQOO Neo5 Vitality Edition to "OriginOS 1."

I wrote a post about it: A Day Downgrading the iQOO Neo5 Vitality Edition to OriginOS 1

Old phones like this really need to be paired with old systems. The newer versions are so negatively optimized it's brutal.

Switching back to OriginOS 1 is so smooth now.

I also switched WeChat to 7.0.22, that ancient version from five years ago, and battery life improved quite a bit.

WeChat Official Accounts

Right now I mainly publish on my personal blog (StarBlog), WeChat official accounts, Zhihu, and Blog Garden. The official accounts hadn't been maintained in a long time either, so once I thought of it I spent some time updating them. (Didn't expect it to take a whole morning 🤣)

Updated the menus

People would often ask for contact info in the backend.

That's when I realized "Xiyuan Life" had never had a menu set up, so I spent some time on it.

While I was at it I also updated the menu on the other tech-focused account. Last time I changed that menu was back in college—years have flown by 🤣

Updated auto-replies

Originally, Xiyuan Code's follow auto-reply looked like this—felt way too salesy.

Changed it to this. Looks much more pleasant.

As for the Life account, it didn't really have a meaningful auto-reply at all, so I updated that too.

Switched Input Methods

At the end of October I happened to come across a WeChat official account recommending Wanxiang, a RIME input scheme.

Looked pretty good.

And I happen to use the RIME input framework on my computers.

So I switched both computers' rime schemes from ice to Wanxiang to try it out.

At first the novelty made it feel pretty nice.

But now I've switched ice back on Jige. Ice still feels more natural to use.

Especially for things like date and time input. I guess there's a reason the ice project has so many stars.

Wrap-up

This first post is just getting things started.

Hope I can keep this series going.

Recording both project progress and the rhythm of life.

If this content can make you smile a little while scrolling on your phone at lunch, on the commute, or before bed, that's enough.

See you next week.