Currently

Inspiration

My favourite thing to talk about with friends is "what are you currently reading/listening to/watching/playing". I love getting recommendations from people I know, to cut through the bloat of the internet. I’ve got friends I go to for music recommendations, or where’s good to eat at the moment. For me there isn't one place at the moment for sharing that.

My go-to reference for this is MySpace, when I was a teenager I'd visit my friends profiles to see what songs they'd line up. I discovered so much through that.

What it does

It's a fully working social media. You can create your profile, follow other users, speak to them through comments, get notifications for when others comment on your posts, share what you're into, save your friends interests. Pretty much everything you'd expect from a social media site, but only posting about cool stuff you're into!

How we built it

Ideally it would be an app, but I wanted to get users trying it out quickly so I've opted for a website (for now). The site works on mobile and desktop, but I'd recommend mobile for the best experience. It works in light and dark mode following your system theme.

I was relatively hands-off with the design, prompting heavily what I saw the app to look and feel like. I referenced a couple of images for theming and tweaked that a bit more myself. Designing through prompt was an interesting challenge for me!

The database is in Supabase, created and edited by Bolt (with a few SQL statements thrown in when I got stuck). This holds all user information, posts, comments, etc.

I deployed the site through Netlify with a custom domain.

Challenges we ran into

I'm not at all experienced in creating databases or maintaining databases, and this caused me a few issues working out why certain things were happening. A big issue was loading times (I found this out thanks to some early user testing). I spent a lot of time in the console trying to work out what was happening before finally realising I hadn’t put anything in place to compress images, so users were downloading massive profile images every time they visited the site.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building a working social media app solo in about 10 days, while working a full-time job and having two kids! I loved the first time I saw my friends posting to it, getting feedback from them, and developing ideas together.

What we learned

This has completely changed the way I think about building out ideas and applications. Nothing feels out of reach, even with limited time or resources!

What's next for Currently

Pushing it out to more users and getting it in the app store.

Built With

• bolt.new
• netlify
• react-native
• supabase