"Building srchParty: A Devblog"

When I thought about what would happen if I lost my journal, one thing bothered me more than losing it. I was fine writing my name and phone number inside the cover — the standard advice — but I felt exposed doing it. What if the finder decided to use what they'd read against me? Privacy shouldn't be the price of getting something back.

That's where srchParty came from. It's a platform that lets you register your physical items so that if a finder picks them up, they can get the item back to you — without either party having to share personal information directly. The QR code on your item links to srchParty, not to your phone number. srchParty handles the connection.

I started building it in October 2024. I'm now getting close to launch, which makes this a good time to start documenting the journey properly. This devblog is that documentation.

What to expect

Weekly posts covering progress, the hard problems, decisions made, and what I learned along the way. The early posts are retrospective — drawn from the dev journal I've been keeping throughout — so we're starting from the beginning even though a lot has already been built.

The format is intentionally candid. Bugs and wrong turns are part of the story, not things to hide. If you're building something yourself, the messy middle is probably the most useful part to read.

The stack

srchParty is a LAMP application — Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP — built mobile-first. It's a web app for now, not native mobile, but designed from the start for the way people actually use their phones. The UI is meant to feel at home on a small screen even before it ever becomes an app.

The core idea

There are two sides to the platform: owners and finders. Owners register items and attach a QR code or URL. Finders who pick up a lost item scan the code, report it found through srchParty, and the owner gets notified — without the finder ever seeing the owner's phone number, and without the owner knowing exactly who the finder is unless they choose to share that. The privacy is structural, not just a setting.

Let's start at week one.