Some context up front: I’d never written and deployed a real app before this. I know a lot about how software should behave — years on the other side of it, testing things, thinking about what a sane release process looks like — I just hadn’t done the actual building part. This project was me finally doing that, working almost entirely alongside Claude Code as the one actually writing and reviewing code with me. The “why” is unglamorous: I really like Disneyland, enough that trip planning kept spilling out of my head while I was standing in an actual park queue. That turned into two apps over about 10 months and 620 commits: ParQ Wish Planner — free, open source, Next.js 15 (App Router, static export), local-first via Dexie/IndexedDB, no account or backend required for your own data. Optional cross-device sync goes through Firestore with client-side AES-GCM encryption (Web Crypto), so the server only ever sees ciphertext. → parqwish.com · github.com/jimlaurie/parqwish-planner ParQ Wish Pal — the in-park companion, Expo/React Native, live wait times, GPS trail recording. Small subscription, purely to cover what it costs to keep running — not really the point of the project. Still sitting in App Store review. A few honest notes on the process, since that’s probably more interesting to this crowd than the app itself: It’s not a five-minute vibe-coded thing — the real history is closer to a normal, if unusually well-documented, engineering process: actual production bugs from actual TestFlight use, root-caused properly instead of patched blind. One bug took three separate investigation passes and a temporary diagnostic log before the real cause showed up. The part that actually took the effort was staying the reviewer — deciding what belonged, catching when something was subtly wrong, saying no to scope creep — not the typing. I kept a real dated log of the whole thing instead of writing a highlight-reel version afterward: parqwish.com/story, if you want to see the actual arc. Not trying to sell anything — just sharing because “first-time builder ships two real apps solo” felt like it might be useful or interesting to people in a similar spot. submitted by /u/Robo-majic
Originally posted by u/Robo-majic on r/ClaudeCode