From Writing Requirements Docs to Shipping My First Solo Product

For most of my career, I was the person around the code. I wrote requirements documents. I planned sprints. I argued about pricing models. I sat in rooms with engineers and said things like "can we ship by Friday?" I understood software deeply — but I'd never built an entire product by myself, from idea to deployment. This year, I decided to change that. The result: chinanam.online — a Chinese name generator for foreigners. It's live, it takes real payments, and I built every line of it myself. Here's what that actually looked like. Why This Project I've always been fascinated by how foreigners get Chinese names. Most tools online just phonetically map English sounds to random characters — which produces names that native speakers find odd or meaningless. I thought: someone should build this properly. Then I realized — that someone could be me. It was small enough to ship alone, but complex enough to teach me something. Good enough. What It Does You enter your English name, birthday, g