A long time coming
I've had the notion of building Aficionado for about 4 years now. I started a couple of times but never got too far. I was always working and when I had some downtime between jobs, I quickly found that building it was taking a while (mostly due to all of the third-party providers integrations that are needed for the catalog). I managed to get something out there about a year ago but it was very preliminary and I never had enough time to fully flesh it out.
LLMs got mature enough in the last 8 or so months that it finally became viable to "vibe code" it with a good architectural foundation and minimal oversight.
So in the beginning of July this year I decided to give it another go, and two months later here we are.
I plan to share thoughts, product dilemmas and insights as I go along. Hopefully it'll be insightful for me to log my journey, and if it interests others, even better.
-Lior