Devlog 1 - IT’S CRUNCH TIME BABY

Stardance is ending and I looked back at my project list and realized… I have made absolutely nothing meaningful. Zero. Nada. So here I am, panic-building a journal for your dreams at the last possible moment. Classic me.

The Idea

A dream journal. You wake up, dump whatever weird nonsense your brain cooked up at 3am, and an AI helps you make sense of it. I’m going for a full commercial product approach with this one. I actually want other humans to use it, so it’s hosted on Cloudflare and will be live by the end of Stardance. Mark my words. I WILL SHAVE MY HEAD, I AM NOT KIDDING, if this project is NOT DONE!!.

What’s Working

• Main screen: done
• Login: done (after a LOT of pain, more on that below)
• Database: up in the back doing its job

The Pain (aka what actually happened)

Login tried to end me. Everything worked perfectly on localhost. Pushed to Cloudflare and suddenly nobody could stay logged in. Sessions just… vanished. Turns out my cookies weren’t set with the right SameSite and Secure attributes, so the browser was politely throwing them in the trash on every request. Spent way too long staring at devtools before figuring that one out.

Then CORS decided to join the party. My frontend and the AI backend live on different subdomains, so every API call got blocked until I fixed the headers. I now know more about preflight OPTIONS requests than I ever wanted to.

Database drama. My first schema was one giant table with everything crammed in. User info, dreams, timestamps, vibes, all of it. Felt smart until I had to actually query it. Redesigned it at like 11am into proper tables, wrote a migration, and immediately hit an error because I typo’d a column name. The error message was not helpful. It never is.

The white theme incident. So the current UI is white. Very white. The contrast is so bad that buttons look like vague rectangles floating in the void. Half my text is basically a eyesore. I keep squinting at my own app, which is generally a bad sign. Switching to a dark theme soon, both for aesthetics and for the health of my eyeballs.

The AI backend money pit. For testing, the AI backend is hosted on Hack Club, which works great except for the occasional cold start where the first request takes long enough for me to question my life choices. Fine for testing though. For production, it’s running on my very expensive 2k server. My wallet is crying. 😭

Honorable mention bug: dreams were saving twice for a while. Forgot event.preventDefault() on the form submit, so the page was reloading AND firing the request. Every dream, duplicated. My test account had 14 copies of “I was being chased by a giant duck.”

Next Up

• Dark theme (top priority, my eyes need it)
• Lock in the CSS
• Polish the AI responses
• Actually ship this thing

Once the CSS is locked in, I genuinely think the rest is smoooooth sailing. The hard plumbing is done, now it’s just making it pretty. Famous last words, probably.