Turning a friend's comment into an app: "I wish there was a coffee-themed app that keeps me accountable when I study..."

 

Café Passport is a gamified coffee-shop tracker that turns café visits into a collectible ritual. Users log "runs" (visits), rate shops across work-relevant dimensions like Wi-Fi, noise, and seating, collect each shop as a tiered badge in a passport, set personal quests, share progress, and focus with a coffee-themed Pomodoro timer. An interactive map surfaces nearby independent coffee shops to discover and collect.

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I owned the product end to end: defining the concept and feature set, prioritizing into phased releases, and making the core build tradeoffs: a local-first architecture (on-device storage, no accounts) to keep it free and privacy-respecting, a PWA over native iOS to ship without App Store cost and overhead, and OpenStreetMap/Overpass over paid mapping APIs to stay zero-cost. Built with React, TypeScript, ClaudeCode, and Leaflet. 

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Early feedback from 15 testers shaped modifications: switching mapping tool from Overpass (which blocks both CORS browser requests and selective server IPs) to Nominatim, which has proper CORS headers and works directly from the browser.​

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GitHub Link: 

https://github.com/annaslavuk/cafe-passport.git

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