What are or have been your technical challenges (and possible solutions) managing a SaaS as a solo developer?

I have been developing MechCloud single-handedly for the past many months. This software is meant to be a universal abstraction for cloud-native apps which can be deployed on any platform and on any public cloud ( small or large) without any need of learning the target platform (e.g. k8s) or public cloud (e.g. AWS) specific concepts.

As this is a side project currently which I have been managing in addition to my full-time job, I have always been looking for ways to optimize things so that I can achieve more in less time with every passing day.

The purpose of this post is to gather insights around challenges that a solo developer may face while developing and deploying a cloud-native app which is what any SaaS application is these days IMO.

This post is NOT about why a developer -

• Chose a programming language X over Y.
• Chose a framework X over Y.
  etc etc

Here are some examples from my personal experience and I am looking for similar examples -
Development

• I develop and debug my application using two different setups. The first one is this and the second one is a remote dev setup inside a k8s cluster on my desktop. Both of these have their own Pros and Cons and I keep on switching between two from time to time.
• I used to use the first setup all the time before it reached a point where I had to repeat all the testing in both local dev and release (a k8s cluster) environments to make sure that everything is working fine inside a k8s cluster. That is where I ended up setting up a remote dev environment inside a k8s cluster to avoid duplication of testing efforts. This resulted in a significant boost to my speed of delivering more features in less time but came with a drawback of managing k8s on my own.
• Micro app architecture for splitting frontend apps ( based on VueJs ) into logical micro apps so that a micro-app and its associated microservices can be managed at a unit and scaled independently by deploying these in a dedicated k8s namespace.

DevOps

• Using single and generic github action / dockerfile for one type (e.g. python based) of microservices so that I can update these from a central location.

Documentation

• Documenting certain information at one place and then rendering it inline at all the places where it is required instead of providing a link to it at all such places. This makes it easier to understand some concepts under a single tab instead of opening multiple tabs for linked documentation to understand the full context. I am yet to achieve this.