Ten Weeks From First Commit to Public Beta

The first commit for GrooveShouter landed in late August 2025. Ten weeks later, on November 1st, it went live as a public beta — a genuinely fast timeline for a side project built in evenings and weekends, on self-hosted infrastructure I was still figuring out as I went (see the previous posts on Proxmox, GitLab CI, and PWAs).

Go-live didn't mean "done." Within days, real guest feedback made it obvious the first guest-facing UI wasn't cutting it on an actual phone, in an actual venue. The fix was Guest Menu V2: a mobile-first redesign of the core interaction guests have with an event, shipped just three days after the beta opened. It was a good early lesson in the difference between "it works when I test it" and "it works in someone else's hands, in a dark room, one-handed, with a drink in the other" — a theme that would keep coming back throughout the project.