SpiritSafe

A spirits collection tracker for collectors - label-scanning autofill, a real flavour and cask vocabulary, and your whole shelf on Android, iOS and web from a single Kotlin Multiplatform codebase.

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Inspiration

I started collecting spirits a few years ago after a trip to Mexico where I fell in love with tequila, so I bought a few bottles home. I had never really like tequila before, but I consider myself a foodie and have always loved tasting new and exotic flavours. I realised, I hadn't had good tequila before which is why I didn't like it. So I followed the white rabbit and this led me to a vast array of flavours I had never tried before, leading to a passion for not only tequila but whisky, rum, gin and anything else that tastes good. Before long I had amassed a number of bottles I couldn't keep track of, and when I looked online for a solution I basically came back to a spreadsheet... which I hated. I had multiple sheets tracking bottles I had, bottles I wanted, bottles I had committed too and it all felt a little disjointed. And so I fixed my 'problem' by building SpiritSafe - to make collecting fun.

What it does

SpiritSafe is a collection based application, letting spirit enthusiasts add their bottles to an inventory, mark where in their home they are stored, rate them, add tasting notes, and easily sample them to folks because sharing is the best part of the hobby. Many of us also have problems deciding what to drink on a given day, especially when their collections starts getting prolific, the choice becomes paralyzing - so we have a random dram selector. In many areas, spirit hobbyists make connections with liquor stores who - in exchange for high sales - provide access to bottles preferentially which helps individuals attain those hard to find bottles. The problem is, most of these commitments are tracking in lists on chat applications like whatsapp which are very hard to find and keep track of so SpiritSafe provides a way to manage your commitments which can help curb spending need be or remind you when bottles will be dropping. Social features are also paramount - spirits are a social hobby after all. So we are able to friend others and share lists of what bottles you have, this means you can trade samples or just ask for a specific bottle to be brought to your next meetup.

How we built it

At my place of work we have been strongly encouraged to move towards using LLM's in our day to day tasks. While I have many feelings about this, I decided to give it a go with this personal project I had been thinking about for a long time now and had even built a few small versions - trying to figure out exactly what I wanted. I started with a plan I had been devising for a long time with a list of features I had collected, some designs of what I wanted the UI to look like and some fundamentals like the stack to use, that it was to be KMP etc. Once I had this, I fed it into an LLM and it produced the first iteration of SpiritSafe. I have been reworking and refining it since, using both LLM's and manual coding to streamline the features to work well together. I think the result is quite fun to use

Challenges we ran into

Aside from finding time to work on this, this was mostly uncharted territory. I started out as a mobile engineer in 2009 - when Android was still built with Java, but moved to backend engineering 6 years thereafter. The last app I released was so long ago, it felt like I was starting from scratch. I also had zero iOS knowledge and had generally avoided iOS like the plague. But so many of the folks I spent time with in the hobby has iPhones, I knew I had to make the app available for both. I think the app in and of itself is relatively simple, getting all the parts working together was a little more tricky and navigating the differences between platforms both build and deployment etc was quite a good challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Sharing the app with friends who will use it has been a really great feeling. I love the idea of imaging something and then seeing it come to life - it's why I love software engineering so much.

What we learned

Publishing an app is way more work than I expected. I work professionally as a backend engineer, and find it more convenient to get changes out, updated or rolled back etc. Also there are no stores that have stringent requirements to deal with (I absolutely respect the need however)

What's next for SpiritSafe

A lot of refinement - I am passionate about a easily maintainable and readable code base and have spent an obscene amount of time making sure it's not garbage. More social features - I'd like to improve the interactions between friends and potentially create a feed to keep folks connected. Club features - whisky clubs and rum clubs all run through various means at the moment and most of the time lack good event management and discussion boards. So would like to do that. Mostly the app is built for myself - it's something I want to enjoy using and makes my life easier to manage the ever growing collection of booze.

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