Joke Central

Joke Central lets users explore a library of over 10,000 jokes, create their own, and enjoy jokes shared by the community. It's like social media but focused entirely on humor!

Development began in early 2024 during a sprint session with Asgeir Albretsen and I. We moved from concept to design in Figma, embracing a playful, dynamic design system that diverged from the more polished theme used in Fun Libs. Creating assets with a fun, 3D feel using CSS provided a refreshing front-end challenge, moving beyond my typical experience with professional-looking designs.

The app was originally created with a home-made backend hosted on a server of our own making, running on Asgeir's Raspberry PI. After having finished almost all of the functionality and developing the entire front-end, we realized that managing a homemade server brought technical limitations and accumulated technical debt.

In June of 2024, right at the finish-line, we decided to do a complete turn-around, build a backend using Supabase, redo the interface, and make the app a general jokes app, rather than focusing on daily contests. But at the same time our motivation to keep working on the project had burnt out completely.

In October 2024, my motivation returned, and I created a new codebase, reusing many front-end components from the original. Development with Supabase took about two weeks, and after overcoming some DevOps challenges, the app was finally released on the Play Store on November 1st of 2024.