As a kid, collecting sports cards was one of my favorite things. It is a shame all those cards are worthless now, but fortunately that means recollecting them is super affordable!

I recently rediscovered the hobby and following my post about all the different Washington Football Team starting QBs over my lifetime, I got interested in collecting more than just all the Jayden Daniels rookie cards I could discover (there are far too many; the current industry is stupid, but that’s a topic for another post).

Even with only one list of cards to collect, I wanted something more meaningful and interesting to track them with. Seemingly every night for a week I came up with yet another list that would be cool… I was going to need a real application.

After about a month of side hustling, the personal portion of this is ready to unveil. Live site here, technical details here (there’s a lot more going on in the administrative side that you can’t see – image fetching and editing, configuration of just about everything you see).

Just today, I completed my first checklist – JMU alumni who have made the pros (this is about to get messy with transfer portal garbage; I’ll have to figure out how to manage that). I’ve also recently created an Eagles checklist for my dad – super cool diving into some history and seeing all these old cards… at least to me 😊🤓

At this point, this is a pretty significant bit of software. It is entirely data/config driven, has various deployment methods for testing, and just about everything is modifiable via UI as opposed to code with it making smart decisions when you’d shoot yourself in the foot with bad ones (poor contrasting color decisions, mostly). Anyone could use it.

My to-do list is getting pretty short so I’m not sure what’s next other than to collect. Productize?

I’ll probably unveil this to a card collecting community or two and gauge interest. The existing options in this space are pretty archaic and ugly so I do feel there is room for me, but supporting a SaaS for funsies might not be all that funsies; have to manage security, content, OTHER STUFF.

This has been a really fun project that couldn’t have come to fruition without AI. It is just so damned cool… Now that this is mostly wrapped up I can get back to that app I promised the girls? The app is near complete… It is the production of AI illustrations that is still such a headache 😔 I just need to bear down and learn it.