Lessons from Five Months of Developing a CRM Solo with Laravel and Livewire

Lessons Learned from Developing an Open-Source CRM in Five Months: A Solo Developer’s Journey with Laravel and Livewire

Embarking on a journey to create an open-source Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, I dedicated five months to crafting a fully functional MVP solely as a solo developer. Throughout this process, I gained valuable insights into the technical stack, development strategies, and project management that can benefit other developers pursuing similar goals.

Key Highlights of My Experience

Positives and Accelerators:

Filament Admin Panel: This tool proved transformative, dramatically reducing development time. Tasks that might have taken weeks were completed in days, thanks to its robust features and ease of use.
Laravel + Livewire: Combining these frameworks provided an ideal environment for solo development. It eliminated the need to build separate APIs or frontend layers, streamlining the entire process.
Enjoyable Modern PHP: The evolution of PHP into a modern, strongly-typed language was a pleasant surprise. With 99.6% type coverage and PHPStan level 7, writing maintainable and bug-resistant code became enjoyable.

Challenges and Lessons Learned:

Handling Custom Fields: Managing a large number of custom fields (over 50 per record) initially seemed straightforward, but performance issues emerged. Page load times increased from approximately 250 milliseconds to over two seconds. I optimized this by implementing more efficient eager loading and caching strategies.
Target Audience Focus: Building for a broad “everyone” often dilutes focus. Instead, I found that narrowing my target to small, tight-knit teams led to a more practical and user-centric application.
Open-Source Realities: Maintaining an open-source project demands ongoing commitment. It’s not just about initial development; consistent updates, bug fixes, and community interaction are integral to success.

Effective Technology Choices

Drupal-like Conventions: Adhering to Laravel’s established conventions kept development predictable and efficient.
Early Adoption of PHPStan: Integrating static analysis from day one helped catch issues early, saving time and reducing bugs.
Leveraging Filament: Instead of building admin interfaces from scratch, I utilized Filament, which accelerated development and provided a professional interface out of the box.

Reflecting on the Timeline

Completing an MVP in five months was both a swift achievement and a reminder of the effort involved. While it’s gratifying to have a production-ready product