lovelyweb.site

Organise your entire communication workflow with this lovely website.

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Inspiration

I've always wanted to build a unified communication platforms. I hated the idea of having to leave Gmaol to open Microsoft Teams or something and then send some messages on WhatsApp. These three services are built by massive companies who all have several other applications that they maintain, and since they're all competitors, there'll never be an integration between them. Hence, I set out to build the best communication platform, one that supports emails, chat messages, calls and meetings, kanban boards, notes, and even to-do list.

I felt that this hackathon was the perfect opportunity to get started with this idea. I also saw the things offered in the builder pack, and that made it even more compelling for me to get started right away. Unfortunately, something came up in my life, and I was only able to devote about seven out of the thirty days towards building this project. With bolt, I was able to move twice as fast and come up with a working prototype implementation with quite a few features!

You can try out the app at https://lovelyweb.site. If you have any questions, feel free to email support@lovelyweb.site, or mail me personally though my email which can be found at my website.

What it does

The Lovely Website is a communication platform that helps your organisation's members communicate effectively and efficiently with each other. Currently, it supports chat messages (with voice messages and AI), multiplayer real-time kanban boards, and note-taking with rich text support. It will soon support AI-enhanced emails, calendars, tasklists, and an AI powered chatbot which uses your data to build its answers.

How we built it

This project was built in around a week using bolt, SvelteKit, shadcn-svelte with TailwindCSS, Supabase, ElevenLabs, and deployed to the world using Netlify.

I started the project on bolt by asking it to design a beautiful landing page. I initially wanted to name the website organised.today, but I later chose lovelyweb.site instead. I feel it is indeed a lovely website for supporting so many features in just a week of building.

Most of the hard work (especially on the UI) was done by bolt. It acted as my pair programmer. I'd ask it to implement a feature, and then I'd be off doing something else in the project, or updating the database, or doing whatever else it is. Bolt effectively doubled my manpower and allowed me to focus on the things that mattered, rather than wasting my time doing some trivial things that bolt would finish in seconds.

For a more in-depth description of how I built this app, I've posted some "devlogs" on my blog at https://aarnavpai.in/posts/worlds-largest-hackathon.

Challenges we ran into

Due to the LLM cutoff date, bolt used Svelte 4 and Tailwind 3, instead of the latest Svelte 5 and Tailwind 4. I did try to migrate this to the latest version, but unfortunately bolt would either write code using the old svelte state syntax, or would hallucinate a made-up syntax. Therefore, I had to stick to Svelte 4 and Tailwind 3.

Another challenge I faced was that I was too ambitious! I had planned to do so much in so less time, so I had to cut out a lot of features to make it in time :(

Unfortunately, most of my time was spent on making an email server from scratch in Rust to deploy on a DigitalOcean VPS. I wanted to use this hackathon to learn something new, and I did learn a lot about email protocols. Things like SMTP, MIME, SPF, DKIM, etc. I realised that this would take me too much time, so I tried using an already existing robust SMTP server called OpenSMTPD, and then writing a Rust service on top of that to expose an API for the Lovely Website, but unfortunately, I ran out of time and had to scrap the idea to make it in time for the hackathon. I'm certainly going to be making that email server in my free time though, it was so much fun! If only I had used bolt, alas!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm proud of the work I got done in such less time. It was mostly because of bolt speeding me up by working on things that would waste a lot of my time, while I built the part of the app that mattered. If I didn't have bolt, I'm certain this would have taken me twice as much or more time. I also love how the app looks.

What we learned

Initially coming into this hackathon, I was skeptical of AI, since I used it a long time ago, when it wasn't up to the mark, and all it did was mess up the codebase, but with the newer models like Claude Sonnet 4, and the tools built around those models like bolt, I can say that AI has certainly improved into being an actual help rather than something to closely babysit and watch for.

I also did learn quite a bit about email. I read through the SMTP, Internet Mail Format, and MIME specs, and skimmed the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC specifications. I had quite a bit of fun writing the Rust server, the filter, and configuring and hardening the linux VPS, but unfortunately, I didn't have enough time to put that into the app.

What's next for lovelyweb.site

I'd love to further develop lovelyweb.site into a communication platform that can rival the big players out there and actually be worth paying for. I'd start by implementing the email side of things, then add voice and video conversations and meetings, and then move on to other things that may be useful. If you have any suggestions, feedback, or wishes, please reach out to me at my email address visible on my website https://aarnavpai.in!

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