When my wife and I were having trouble coming up with baby names a little over a year ago, I had an idea for an app that would help you rapidly see different baby name ideas. At the time, I made a quick prototype that we played around with. Today, I relesed an MVP of the idea at hatchling.app—and it only took me two days to build.

React has it’s faults, but when you get good with it you can develop apps fast. The app was bootstrapped with create-react-app and uses local storage (with my use-local-storage hook) to do everything client-side. It’s deployed using GitHub webooks to Vercel. If I need to push up a change, it’s mere seconds between hitting the repo and being in production (tl;dr: Vercel is incredible).

At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon, I can’t believe how quick and easy it is to make and deploy a web app these days. I’m glad I have the experience of FTPing files to a server I had to manually set up, but I would definitely not go back to those days.

Anyways, I’d appreciate if you took a look at the Hatchling app and let me know if you have any feedback on the app or questions about how I put it together.