In 2012, Wellington’s craft beer scene was exploding. New beers, new bars, new breweries. It was fun, but hard to keep track of it all.
Enter Craftie.
The idea was simple: bars would manage their tap lists online, and users would get notifications when bars or beers they followed stocked up.
I thought this would take a few weekends. Naive, young, and optimistic, I sent an email to Volstead, one of my favourite bars in Christchurch.
Hi, I’m thinking of building an app that would allow customers to get notifications for when beers they like are back in stock.
Would you like this?
They were into it, so I got started.
At the time I was a law student taking computer science electives for fun. I had no real idea how to build the web and mobile app I had in mind.
Still, I had a friend who was great at web development. On weekends we would sit in Wellington’s public library and they would teach me how to build PHP applications running locally, complete with phpMyAdmin and custom authentication and routing.
And with that, I made the first version of Craftie:
This screenshot is all I have left of it. There was probably an SVN repository somewhere too, but it’s all lost to time at this stage.
There it was: Craftie, a website where bars could log in, manage beers, update stock status, and add an image or description. It wasn’t responsive, secure, accessible, or scalable, but I loved it in all its CRUD-glory.
For the iOS app, I eventually had the table view controllers that could fetch the beer data and display it in a list. Feeling bold, I let users not only favourite beers, but rate them too.
Building the web app was satisfying, but seeing something I built on my own phone was the thing that really got me. Around this point I switched majors to software engineering and never looked back.
With the web app in place and the iOS app working, it should have been time to ship. However, I fell into the classic trap of always needing to build just one more thing.
Even after rewriting in Laravel:
And then again in Rails:
And then refreshing the iOS app to fit with the iOS 7 aesthetic:
I felt a small amount of relief when Untappd shipped notifications in their app.
Now, in 2020, I visit Volstead’s site to see how they’re doing. The beers still look great, and the tap list is online. At the bottom, in light grey text: “powered by Untappd”. No tears, obviously.