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I Had Never Deployed Anything — Then I Built a Real Product with Claude
How a designer learned GitHub, Supabase, and backend thinking from scratch
Chun-Chuan Lin9 min read·Just now--
This is the second piece in a short series about Whilst.
In the first article, I wrote about the product idea — why I set out to build a finance app, and why it became something closer to a mirror instead.
If you haven’t read it, you can start here:
I Set Out to Build a Finance App. I Built a Mirror Instead.
A UI/UX designer’s account of building a product with Claude, and what it asked of me along the way.
medium.com
This piece focuses on the other side of the story — how I actually built it.
My starting point
I had never deployed anything on my own.
I had a basic understanding of HTML and CSS, but GitHub, to me, was something engineers used. I didn’t really know what Supabase was, let alone databases or authentication systems.
This piece is a record of a designer starting from zero, building and shipping a real product independently for the first time — one with a backend, authentication, and a database.
