After a 6-month flop, a testing database tool shipped in 2 weeks
A previous project took 6 months of polishing, including a highly refined dashboard, but launched to almost no users. The new approach was to build and share a rougher product quickly instead of waiting for to feel finished. TrashDB is a testing tool that creates short-lived Postgres, Redis, Mongo, ChromaDB, or Qdrant containers through an API call in about 200 milliseconds.
Developers can run tests against those temporary databases, and the databases delete themselves after a set time. The problem came from painful local testing and : made a Mac run heavily, and shared staging databases caused tests to fail unpredictably. The build stayed simple so it could move fast.
It uses a .NET 10 API that talks directly to Docker on a small Hetzner VPS, with Next.js for the frontend. Kubernetes was avoided to keep the setup simpler.
Key points
- The earlier project took 6 months to polish but attracted almost no users after launch.
- TrashDB was built and shared in 2 weeks instead of being kept private until perfect.
- It creates temporary database containers through an API call for tests.
- The temporary databases remove themselves after a set time.
- The stack was kept simple with .NET 10, Docker, a small Hetzner VPS, and Next.js.