It’s a good story, illustrating the hardship juniors face. I would not go as far as saying you’ve learnt coding, but you did indeed learn some aspects of coding and kept trucking despite the occasional blockers. That’s a good attitude, one that even many mid and senior level coders lack.

I would also point out that PHP is NOT uncool. Just because 90% of the frameworks out there are JS, does not mean PHP is any less popular. In fact PHP7 has been proven to be faster than Ruby on Rails — an otherwise “cool” language and framework.

Finally, the one thing I don’t agree with is the price that cost you to build this. Those 118 hours are worth money. Using this time calculator site I selected average and lower level settings trying to replicate your situation, and got a final value of $21/h. Theoretically, that is what your spare time is worth. $21 * 118 = $2478. Add to that the electricity you used for running the computer, lighting the room in the evening (unless you’re a bat and code in the dark) and the cost of your internet connection. Let’s say that rounds thing up to $2550. These are your development and development associated costs. I think it’s important you think like this for a number of reasons: saying it cost $11 makes it feel cheap and worthless, which it is clearly not, and no one should ever see your time as worth $zero. Also, a potential client who might want to buy this should never think of offering you less than those $2550 and you should never sell it for less. I know you feel that you have gained a lot of experience while building this app and that in itself holds great value, and yes, that is true, but so do people who get paid $100.000 at the end of each month, because in coding learning is crucial and it is part of the job.

Well done, Andrey Azimov!