SaaS Manual teaches you how to build commercial software services that are production-ready, scalable, maintainable, and secure. It teaches you all of this from scratch.
<aside> 🙃 Warning: Keep reading only if you are ready for inception.
</aside>
https://landing.mailerlite.com/webforms/landing/b4c8x1
I (find me here on Twitter) started working on the web around 1996 and since then was fortunate to build many SaaS products with incredibly talented people, including most recently, Cloud9 IDE as the VP of Engineering.
Cloud9 IDE was acquired by AWS and I have spent the past three years at Amazon, gaining a lot of valuable insight and learning many lessons on how to build and operate software systems at scale. It's time to share this knowledge with you.
There are many topics which you need to learn about when you build software products for the web. Often, courses, books, articles, or tutorials cover individual topics, like "Client-Side JavaScript", "Service-Based Architectures" or "Serverless For Dummies", you name it.
SaaS Manual takes on a different approach. Instead, we'll be building a complete software service from scratch and cover topics as they come up.
There is a catch. And it's cool! Let me explain:
You might say, "But pleeeeaaaase, not another TODO list, pleeease??". I got you covered, you won't build another TODO list.
We will build saasmanual.com instead!! We'll be eating our own dog food 🎉. And you can be a part of this journey. You actually already are, because you have read until here 🤗.
SaaS Manual will become a fully-fledged product. Call it a learning platform. With accounts, billing, a public/private API, static and dynamic pages, a CDN, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, serverless and so much more (don't worry if those words don't mean a thing to you just yet).
Everything will be public¹ and there won't be any hidden secrets² or parts where you’d wonder "how do they really work?". And we won't rely on too many external tools or frameworks, so you’ll really get to learn and see what it takes to build a software product. It is the real deal.
In other words:
Imagine you are going to build a house, from scratch, for real, finding some land, stacking the bricks, building a roof, until you can move in³. You will make many mistakes, like forgetting a wall, placing sockets in the wrong places, making a measuring mistake... But you'll get it done. And you'll be so happy that you did. Because you’ve learned invaluable lessons in building your own house.
With SaaS Manual, you can join the journey of building a complete software service. From scratch.
SaaS Manual currently exists only on this page. The domain saasmanual.com, Twitter handle @saasmanual, Facebook page, and GitHub organization have been created but nothing else exists. Sign up below, if you want to join this journey. I promise it will be fun and insightful. And in case you wonder what the first lesson will be? It most likely will be the creation of the actual SaaS Manual landing page.
https://landing.mailerlite.com/webforms/landing/b4c8x1
To begin with, you will learn how to build a complete SaaS product from scratch, and that is kind of a big deal. By building saasmanual.com into a fully-fledged learning platform you will learn how to build SaaS products from scratch. I know it's kind of a mind-warp! By reading this, you already entered the Matrix, there is no way back 😎.
Secondly, as we embark on this journey, we will come across a number of topics that I wrote down below. Basically a brain-dump of my experience over the past 20 years. We might never get to cover some topics because they won't be needed to make SaaS Manual a successful product, but we also might. In my experience, we will cover most... eventually.