Post-It!

Post-It is a creative writing platform where users explore daily prompts, read others’ responses, and share their own — all in an interactive, sticky note-style format.

Comment

Inspiration

Though our team can write some pretty darn good code, we also think in stories, prose, and other creative mediums. Just like a wall of sticky notes captures fleeting thoughts, we wanted a space where ideas could grow into pieces of art—spontaneous, colorful, and shared. Our goal with Post-It was to create a functional and aesthetic all-in-one platform for readers and writers to explore daily prompts, consume and share stories, and connect creatively with others in an interactive sticky note format.

What it does

Each day, a creative prompt is generated by Google Gemini, which is then published to the web app for creatives all around the world to use as a starting point. The main page displays the prompt and all submitted responses (formatted as browsable sticky notes), retrieved and rendered from a Supabase database. To write your own sticky note, you can use our web app's fully integrated rich text editor to meet all your formatting and aesthetic needs. From there, you can submit your story and watch the board populate in real time. You can also create a profile (with a pen name) for all your stories to be accredited to, which stores a bunch of user statistics and other notes you've bookmarked.

How we built it

We built the app with a modern JavaScript stack. For the frontend, we used Next.js and TailwindCSS. We wanted to try something new for the backend, so we decided to use Supabase. We used its hosted PostgreSQL database with the supabase-js client to read and update data directly in the frontend. We also took advantage of Supabase’s authentication services in combination with Google OAuth for easy and secure authentication. We also called the Gemini API to generate a new prompt daily, using a serverless function and a cron job directly in Supabase. Finally, we deployed the app on Vercel.

Challenges we ran into

We communicated well at the beginning, but as time went on and we got more tired, we began doing more work separately. As such, we ended up having complex merge conflicts that took a while to iron out, though we managed to get ourselves back on track early in the morning, so we were all on the same page.

Also, we had initially implemented our MVP – which relied on a simple, anonymous-user system where every person who uses the site got assigned an ID. But when we were moving past that — with profile and authentication support — because of the code’s structure, we had to make major changes. One example of this was with user data; nothing had to be tracked initially because of the anonymity, but after users started having their own information, we had to pass variables and such around through files, and this became complicated fast.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were really proud of our website’s design and commitment to the minimalist/monospace/bookish aesthetic, from the color scheme to the typefaces to the witty one-liners that greet users with empty profiles or bookmarks. The interface ended up turning out really nicely, and we were able to implement all the primary functionality we desired. Additionally, the level of efficiency we achieved with our collaboration, especially considering that it was half of our team’s first hackathon, was pleasantly surprising. We were able to resolve issues working together and did great with delegation, resulting in all of us learning something and being able to make meaningful contributions. We’re also proud of the fact that we were able to sleep (it actually made a crazy difference).

What we learned

We communicated well at the beginning, but as time went on and we got more tired, we began doing more work separately. As such, we ended up having complex merge conflicts that took a while to iron out; though we managed to get ourselves back on track early in the morning, so we were all on the same page.

Also, we had initially implemented our MVP – which relied on a simple, anonymous-user system where every person who uses the site got assigned an ID. But when we were moving past that — with profile and authentication support — because of the code’s structure, we had to make major changes. One example of this was with user data; nothing had to be tracked initially because of the anonymity, but after users started having their own information, we had to pass variables and such around through files, and this became complicated fast.

What's next for Post-It!

We envision several exciting directions for Post-It looking ahead. One future addition would be a personalized feed powered by a social media-style algorithm, allowing users to see sticky notes tailored to their interests, favorite writing styles, or other filters. We also hope to introduce collaboration features, enabling writers to co-author stories, leave feedback, and engage in communities. Finally, we plan to implement the ability to edit previously submitted stories, giving users the flexibility to refine their work and track their growth as writers over time.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates