What it is
HobbyCat is a home for your hobbies: chess, climbing, woodworking, watercolor, whatever you keep coming back to. Log sessions, capture small bits of progress, keep a visual library of what you’ve made. No followers, no leaderboards, no streak anxiety.
All your hobbies, first-class, side by side.
How it started
HobbyCat is the only product on this page I didn’t concept alone. My partner had the idea and shaped the whole feel of it: the name, the tone, every visual decision, the little cat. She designed it by hand. I’m the developer on this one; the soul of the app is hers.
Why we built it
She kept starting hobbies and losing the thread of where she was. Notes apps weren’t right. Photo libraries weren’t right. Hyper-specific trackers forced her to pick one activity. She wanted a craft diary, not a social network, not a productivity tool, that treats every hobby the same way. I wanted to build it with her.
How it’s built
- Rails 8 + Hotwire, with a lot of care around photo handling
- Hotwire Native on iOS and Android
- PostgreSQL + Kamal 2 on a Hostinger VPS
- Stripe via Pay gem (web payments)
- FCM for Android push, APNs for iOS
Screenshot placeholder. Real screenshots coming.