Daily Meow

Signup is disabled entirely at the authentication level, the only way in is an admin-issued invite. That's a deliberate constraint, not a missing feature: the entire value of the feed depends on it staying small and trusted. Members sign in with a magic link, no passwords to manage.

Rather than optimizing an infinite scroll for engagement, Daily Meow runs a scheduled job that picks a "Daily Meow" and a "Weekly Champion" from what's been posted, giving good photos a second life without anyone having to manually curate a highlight reel.

When the family hasn't posted in a while, the feed doesn't just go quiet. A background job pulls in curated cat content from Reddit, YouTube, The Cat API, and Giphy to keep it alive, always ranked behind actual member posts, never mixed in as if someone in the family shared it. Different post types are interleaved by recency too, so one big batch of same-type imports can't bury everything else at the bottom.

The pick isn't just flagged in the data, it gets its own visual treatment: a trophy banner sets it apart from a regular post the instant it renders, and every card animates into place the first time it enters the viewport, above the fold or not, through one shared code path, so a highlight actually reads as one instead of blending into the scroll.

Zoomies is a real-time side-scrolling obstacle race, solo against bots or head-to-head, run through a randomly generated house course, starring the same dressed-up cats from the app's Catwalk feature. Photo Scavenger Hunt is a weekly async game where members race to claim photo prompts before anyone else does. Neither needed to exist for the app to work; both exist because a private feed for five people gets a lot more fun with something to actually do in it.

Uploaded video is compressed server-side, not in the browser. A Supabase database webhook triggers a dedicated ffmpeg worker on Cloud Run, so a member can post a video and close the app immediately, the transcode finishes independently, capped at 1080p, H.264 CRF 23, without depending on their device or connection staying alive.

Daily Meow is a React 19 + Vite PWA backed by Supabase for auth, Postgres, storage, and edge functions (invites, push notifications, link previews, and the daily/weekly curation jobs). It's deployed on Vercel and under active, daily development, the family it was built for actually uses it.