Chika

I built this around October to November and it was my first proper Next.js project. The main inspiration was NGL, that anonymous ask-me-anything app. I thought, why not just build my own version of that? So I did. But then it kind of evolved into something a bit more, like a personal social media or anonymous notes app for me and my friends.

This was also my first time using Neon and Drizzle for the backend, so there was a lot of learning going on. I added a blog section, and also integrated S3 for image uploads so people could post pictures. My friends actually used it and were posting stuff on there, which made the whole thing feel worth it. It's not a complicated app by any means, but it was the project where I got really comfortable with the full Next.js stack, and that comfort carried over into everything I built after.

Chika holds a special place for me just because of what it represents. It was the first time I actually finished and deployed something that I thought up myself, from idea to live URL. It's not a world-changing app, but seeing friends use it, post on it, and actually interact with it made me realize that building things for real people, even just your friends, hits completely different from building something just to submit it. That feeling is kind of what pushed me to keep going.