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 start, I barely knew PHP. Laravel? CodeIgniter? Never heard of 'em. 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, zero "vibe coding," and a lot of Googling.
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, 2026. Kad Kahwin Digital has been around for a decade. A whole decade! It’s served over 36,000 users and helped manage an estimated 10,000+ weddings. That’s roughly 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, and debugged more times than I can count—and it’s still standing. Still doing its thing. Still helping people get invited to weddings, one digital card at a time.
And maintaining it all these years? It 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.
Since then, I’ve gone on to develop a lot more software. A few worth mentioning:
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SenangWebs: An all-in-one package featuring a drag-and-drop website builder, a 3D environment editor, a block-based IDE, a blog CMS, and a WhatsApp eStore.
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SenangStart: A constellation of utility libraries covering a UI library, a CSS framework, an icon pack, and an interactive JS framework.
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AlamXR: An immersive learning platform using VR & AR to simulate OSHA PPE standards, convey complex scientific concepts, and traverse difficult-to-access preservation sites.
I also can't forget the friends and family who have supported this entire endeavor along the way. Without their backing, I don't think Kad Kahwin Digital would have lasted 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 there's something about watching your very first app grow up and keep doing good things… that just hits different. ❤️