Baby App

What Inspired Me

As a parent, I found myself constantly juggling between feeding schedules, sleep logs, diaper changes, and developmental milestones. Most of the baby tracking apps I tried were cluttered, overcomplicated, or too clinical. I wanted something simple, intuitive, and tailored to real parents who just want to track, reflect, and support their baby's growth journey—without needing a manual to get started.

That's when the idea of BabyApp Tracker was born: a lightweight, clean, and accessible app to log essential baby care activities while staying easy enough for sleep-deprived moms and dads.

What I Learned

Building BabyApp Tracker taught me a lot—not just technically, but also about product design for real-world users. Here are some key takeaways:

User empathy matters: Designing for exhausted parents is a whole different UX challenge.
Balancing features and simplicity is hard but essential. The more I added, the more I had to remove.

Technically, I sharpened my skills in:

React 18 with TypeScript for type-safe component development
Vite as the build tool and development server for fast hot reloading
Tailwind CSS for utility-first styling and responsive design
Zustand for lightweight, performant state management across multiple stores:
Custom hook system (useCurrentTime, useWindowSize) for reactive UI updates

How I Built It

The app was developed using React 18, chosen for its ability to build core components, firstly for web application, and reach both iOS and Android for later mobile app. Here’s a quick breakdown of the stack and approach:

Each baby activity—like feeding, sleep, diaper change—is represented as an event object with timestamps and optional notes. The timeline view and simple stats give parents a quick overview of the day.

Challenges I Faced

Every project comes with hurdles, and BabyApp Tracker was no exception. Here are a few:

Scope creep: Initially I wanted to build a full-blown parenting assistant. I had to scale back to MVP to get it launched.
Design paralysis: Making the UI both minimal and functional took multiple rounds of trial-and-error.
Data structuring: Modeling baby logs in a flexible way for future analytics while keeping things snappy was tricky.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

My first ever own project beside my 9-5 job
Some features:
- Modular component structure with clear separation of concerns
- Real-time timeline with auto-scrolling to current time
- Advanced session management with overlap detection and cascading updates
- Responsive design with mobile-first approach and adaptive layouts