TL;DR: I’m building Deckbox but for Pokémon cards. Headless WordPress app with a Next.js/React frontend. You can browse the catalog now; you can also request a beta invite if you want to try it out. Want to learn more? Read on!
My first job out of college was for Blackbaud working on their next-generation platform. It was a software-as-a-service built with an API-first design: every action taken by a user, even through the official app, went through the API. During my time there, the primary app went from a Windows application to a Javascript application (something that made my Mac-loving heart happy), and this was possible because the user interface was decoupled from the application logic.
I think this architecture has stuck with me more than I realized. As headless WordPress took off, I had the chance to learn how to properly build a API-based application. Now all I needed was a problem to solve…
A problem like the massive amount of Pokémon cards in my collection. I’ve started selling some of them on TCGplayer, and while they have a decent app, it didn’t quite fit my needs. I needed an application I could store my catalog in and quickly check it for cards that have increased in value. It also needed to be able to tag different versions of the same card for when it came time to build a deck.
I’d worked on something for this before, even wrote a blog post about it, but now it’s time to finish the job. To that end, let me introduce Grimoire.
Yeah, it doesn’t look like much. In the interest of finishing, this is a minimally viable product. In this case, lots of Bootstrap. But let me show you what there is!