The original title is: "7 months building an open-source chess tool. Here's what actually happened."

Short summary

Developer built a chess diagram export tool solo over 7 months to solve a personal need: exporting high-DPI PNGs without watermarks. The technical execution succeeded with features like batch export and cloud sync, but discovery remains unsolved—GitHub and npm don't surface new packages, and the niche audience is small. Key insight: execution is the easy part; distribution and user discovery require fundamentally different skills.

• •Solo indie dev shipped working chess diagram tool with 5 GitHub stars and extracted core into open-source package
• •Technical deep dive: solved Safari GPU memory bug, built strong FEN parser with co-located tests, Supabase RLS integration
• •Distribution is harder than execution—new packages are invisible on npm, niche audience limits organic discovery

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.