I built a whiteboard, accidentally

I’ve been trying to build a whiteboard app for almost a year. I did it because of a couple of reasons: I wanted to try out skia. I wanted to try all the trendy react libraries like Zustand and TanStack Query. And, I wanted to get better at backend development with Go. Okay, to be fair, last one doesn’t sound like what you’d expect for a frontend-heavy project. But that is exactly what started all of this! I didn’t want to build a basic CRUD backend app. I wanted to build something real, something challenging. A backend for a collaborative whiteboard seemed like a great idea. So, I got to work. I implemented basic auth, classic CRUD endpoints, messaging with NATS JetStream, observability, and finally, WebSocket messaging. Eventually, Postman just didn’t feel like enough to test my app. And then I thought building a minimal frontend app would be a good idea because I like to see what I’m building. So I started building it. After a couple of days, it was done. Then I decided to try out fr