Building Banavu Kids Activities Finder App
👋🏼Ola. This is Viral Parekh here. This blog documents my ongoing journey of building Banavu Kids Activities Finder app and its associated systems - challenges encountered, how I solved them and what I learned along the way. New posts will be coming up regularly so check back often 😊
Browse by Category
UI Fixes
Visual bugs, broken layouts, and rendering glitches — and how I fixed them.
Coming soon
UI Performance
Janky screens, frozen lists, and multi-second delays. Profiled and fixed.
Coming soon
Backend Fixes
Data bugs, sync issues, and Firestore problems in my ingest pipeline.
Coming soon
Backend Performance
Expensive reads, slow queries, and inefficient pipeline steps.
Coming soon
Data Integrity
Duplicate records, migration bugs, and schema evolution done safely.
Coming soon
System Design
Architecture decisions, trade-offs, and the reasoning behind major choices.
1 post →
Analytics
How I instrument the app, what the data revealed, and how I used it to make better decisions.
1 post →
Examples
Templates and reference posts showing how to use blog features like screen recordings and phone mockups.
Coming soon
Production Problems
Bugs that only show up in production — not in development, not on the emulator, not in any build you can easily test.
1 post →
KTLO
The unglamorous maintenance work that keeps the system healthy.
1 post →
Learning new things
Skills I picked up along the way — things outside my comfort zone that became necessary to build the app and blog.
Coming soon
Working with Claude
What I've learned from building this app alongside an AI — the patterns that work, the patterns that don't, and the moments where I had to push back.
1 post →
When Claude Isn't Proactive
Things Claude should have surfaced on its own — capabilities, risks, and gaps that only came up because I asked the right question.
1 post →
New
Posts that don't fit neatly into a single category — product work, launches, and things that crossed the engineering/product boundary.
Coming soon
Fable Flub
Small mistakes Claude made along the way — what it said, why it was wrong, and what I changed so it stays wrong only once.
Coming soon
Trust but Verify
How I built structural enforcement into Claude's behavior — when advisory rules fail, hooks and guards fill the gap.
Coming soon
App Store Marketing
Campaign tracking, QR codes, and the distribution strategies I use to grow the app's install base.
Coming soon
