I met my wife through D&D, so when we got married in April, we decided to go all out and have a TTRPG themed wedding. Me being myself, I built an absolutely over-engineered-ridiculously-juiced-homecooked website for it. Today I'm open sourcing it, and here's a bit of a 🧵
I swear, I looked at off the shelf wedding site builders. But they all suck. ➊ Can't extend fields ➋ Sell you + your guests data ➌ All basic bitch floral aesthetic ➍ Crappy UX for all involved ➎ No dragons. Untenable. So, against my future wife's pleas, I started a new repo.
I worked on it for months, getting exactly the experience I wanted for guests, + all the tooling we could dream of for managing & planning. + RSVPs, w/ deadlines + cutoff + 1 person can RSVP whole group + Stats on meals, etc + Broadcast emailing + TONS more! + 100% our data!
The venue was a castle. We wanted everyone to dress up & feel like they were part of our story. But not everyone was familiar with TTRPGs! This was an opportunity to share some magic with people we love, so setting the right vibe from first interaction was a big focus.
So in addition to the usual RSVP stuff, like food choice, we asked people to join a "guild". It's somewhere between a D&D class, a Hogwarts house, or astrology – something anyone can grok immediately, feels personally authentic, & feels like part of a larger fantasy world.
This screen also served a dual purpose – the person filling it out got all the detail for all the options, but could later add the rest of their party via a faster quick-entry form. (Note that the shaded "Party" field was admin-only)
BTW, did I mention that all account creation was automatic? On initial RSVP, an email is required, and a party is created for that guest. Any +1s they add, with an optional email present (for info emails later), now has a login, and can edit the whole party.
(If you're wondering about these background images, yes they are AI – DALL·E 3 to be precise, and yes I made a GPT so you can make your own!) chatgpt.com/g/g-bb0WtJcAD-…
As the couple, we had our own DM Screen (aka admin view), showing us stats, letting us take notes re: guests, edit content, and send "Scrolls" (email any or all guests). It evolved over time, as needed, and was really nice that we COULD just have any feature we wanted.
And this being nerdy, one-off, homegrown software with the luxury of knowing EXACTLY the number of users, when their would be spikes, & how long it needed to last, I got to have fun with how I made it. (Perhaps a bit too much!)
Every page, even ones that only one or two people would ever see, got to be a fun weird art project. Just functional enough, and then see how much fantasy I could inject. Purely because we would enjoy it!
There are things that didn't make it in time – weddings have a lot of moving parts, this was just one. And the app itself is definitely rough around the edges. But it worked, people loved it, and I'm so happy I took the time.
I wanted to share this for a few reasons. ➊ Show off 😎 ➋ Demonstrate that homecooked software can be genuinely useful, even if it's just for your friends and family, and just for a short time. You don't have to accept off the shelf, even if you're not a Pro Software Engineer™
If you want to try the live site, I'll probably keep it up for another week or two. If you're coming from the future, don't be surprised if these links are broken (or go to someone else's wedding!) nickandmarnie.wedding/
And here's the code. There's a number of things that have been stripped / changed for personal and security reasons, but feel free to use this as a base for your nerdy wedding: github.com/nickisnoble/hy…
Shoutout to @ana_piligrim who gave me the nudge I needed to package this up, and Isaac Chabon for convincing me to open source it. Also @pohtaytoe for feedback and ideas while I was building it
Apparently, just in case someone got lost in the thread, it's customary to link to the start. So here's that: posts.cv/nickisnoble/dL…