Bob Weichler.
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The Startup Commute: A 1.5 Hour Grind.

My commute to our Weichie.com office in Brussels is 45 minutes one way. Going back home also takes me 45 minutes, so with some quick maths, my lose 1 hour and 30 minutes per day that I’m going to the office.

How can I turn this lost time into a win? Because there is a lot to do with that time if you count them together. Some people use it to chat loudly on a crowded train, some read books, work, watch movies, call their loved ones to discuss what’s for dinner, …

Personally, I used it to play games on my phone, read offline articles I’ve saved, or continue to do some work now and then. With my idea for the “Startup Commute” series, I want to motivate myself to make the most out of my commute time.

On average, I work 3 – 4 days a week at the office. This gives me roughly 6 hours a week or almost 30 hours a month.

I am lucky to take a direct train to Brussels, so there are no transfers along the way. I can fire up my laptop once on the train and put it away 1 hour and 30 minutes later.

The Startup Commute Idea

The idea is to build a startup idea on the train. I will try to document my startup adventure in episodes and will try to publish one episode each month. I will try to not spoil my app idea, as it is obviously a genius app idea and no one may steal it! I only go as fast as 1.5 hours a day.

On the train, there is also no internet, so I might cheat a little and do some research in the early morning or evening to help me when I’m stuck.

But my development setup can run completely offline on a local Lando server.

The App Idea

The App Idea itself will be an Android & IOS mobile application, hopefully, available in the App- and Play Store one day. We’ll be targeting the Hospitality industry as this is one of the industries I enjoy the most.

Code-wise, the app will be written with the Ionic Framework. A nice JavaScript framework for building native applications. We’ll be using the VueJS framework (Vue3) together with TypeScript – and probably Pinia as store manager.

For the backend of the application, my colleague Yannick will take care of that. Using Laravel and having all the API routes ready for me like the hero he is on Bruno.

I pull everything in from our GIT repo before the train takes off, and after that, I’m on my own for the next 45 minutes for building feature after feature.

The first month

This month is currently ongoing so I will update this paragraph later. But with the holidays in December in mind, I probably use this pilot episode to get started on the base setup of my application. Combining November & December 2024 as an extended, pilot episode.

Pitfalls in the journey

Working offline is fun and all, but as a developer it’s hard to know everything by heart. Not having internet to Google things slows down development quite a bit actually.

Some pain points I’m facing:

For motivation, here is our first start-up commute in action with me and my Weichie.com business parter Yannick. Bringing our first startup idea to live on a plane flight from Brussels to New York.

Good luck!

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