From Side Project to Automated Trading: Building TrendRider

From Side Project to Automated Trading: Building TrendRider Every developer has that moment when a side project stops being a weekend experiment and starts demanding real architecture decisions. For me, that moment came when my Freqtrade bot made its first profitable trade on Bybit -- and I realized I had no idea if it was actually good or just lucky. This is the story of building TrendRider, from a single Python script to a full platform with a landing page, performance dashboard, and automated signal delivery. The Problem I started trading crypto manually in 2024. The results were predictable: emotional decisions, missed exits, and the constant stress of watching charts. So I did what any developer would do -- I wrote a bot. Freqtrade was the obvious choice. Open source, Python-based, solid community. Within a week I had a strategy running in dry-run mode on Bybit. It was making paper trades, and they looked... promising? But here's the thing about trading bots: you can't tell if the