Swatcher 2.0

When Swatcher was first released, it was a fairly simple concept - pull together paints from different brands available in Ireland, and explore them from one place. Add some colour generation from prompts and match them to real paints. I wasn’t expecting it to take off, but it did. It was both exciting and nerve-wracking. It was strung together with tape, connecting different parts. There was Firebase for authentication and storing user data, Netlify for hosting, with serverless functions to handle things like server-side rendering for SEO, and JSON files of paint data that had to be manually updated and pushed live. I thought I was doing something useful by breaking out the paint data into its own separate API. Now the paint data had to be shared between that and the front-end to generate the sitemaps. I did this to myself. Fun started to become a chore, and I wasn’t enjoying being in maintenance mode when I could have been exploring more ideas and iterating on something without fear…