Back in 2016, fresh out of my diploma and with a bit of free time before starting my degree, I did what any curious nerd would do—I started building a web app.
That app was Kad Kahwin Digital, and little did I know… it’d still be alive and kicking years later. 😳
At the time, I barely knew PHP. Laravel? CodeIgniter? Never heard of her.
So what did I do? I rolled up my sleeves and built the whole dang thing from scratch—in pure vanilla PHP. No frameworks. No fancy tools. Just vibes and a lot of Googling. No vibe coding.
I remember struggling through implementing MVC, messing around with JWT for auth (because I thought it sounded cool), and manually handling things that frameworks now do with a single artisan command.
It was painful. But it was also kind of awesome.
Fast forward to today—Kad Kahwin Digital has been around for almost a decade. A whole decade!
It’s served over 36,000 users and helped manage an estimated 10,000+ weddings. That’s like 1,000 weddings a year… almost 3 weddings a day.
Wild.
What started as a passion project has turned into a personal time capsule of my growth as a developer.
It’s been rewritten, refactored, debugged more times than I can count—but it’s still standing. Still doing its thing. Still helping people plan weddings, one digital card at a time.
And maintaining it all these years? Taught me way more than just code. I learned product development. I learned how to market. I even learned a bit of business along the way.
Also not to forget friends & family that have been supporting the whole endevour along the way.
Without their support I don't think Kad Kahwin Digital will last this long.
Now, with AI creeping into everything, will this project still be around for another 10 years? Honestly, who knows?
But as long as people are still using it, I’ll keep it alive. Because something about watching your very first app grow up and keep doing good things… that hits different. ❤️