Hi HN,

I'm a 15-year-old full-stack developer, and I recently built Codeown (https://codeown.space).

The problem I wanted to solve: GitHub is great for code, but not for showing the "journey" or the UI. LinkedIn is too corporate and noisy for raw, work-in-progress (WIP) dev projects. I wanted a dedicated, clean space where developers can just share what they are building, get feedback, and log their progress.

Tech Stack: > I built the frontend with React and handle auth via Clerk. I recently had to migrate my backend/DB off Railway's free tier (classic indie hacker struggle!), but it taught me a lot about deployment and optimization.

We just hit our first 5 real users today, and the community is slowly starting to form.

I’m still learning, and I know the performance and UI can be improved. I would absolutely love your brutal, honest feedback on:

The perceived performance (currently working on optimizing the React re-renders).

The core idea – is this something you would use to track your side projects?

Thanks for taking a look! Happy to answer any technical questions.

First of all: kudos on building this app. I think it's really impressive to build and showcase your project at such a young age.

I'm actually a user of https://wip.co/ . I think it's quite similar to your project. You should check it out. Also, check out https://peerlist.io/

Social platforms/marketplaces are genuinely difficult, cause it only works if you have enough users (both, demand and supply).

Since it's your early projects (I'm assuming), I think you should built it purely for the sake of learning and feedback. Even if it doesn't work out, the experince is extremely valuable.

Later - if you are serious about a sustainable project - I would recommend that you study your alternatives/competitors (such as the ones I just shared), and figure out what works for them and what are their users missing.

:)

I really like your UI (cool typeface especially), my biggest problem so far just poking around is how I don't exactly see how this differs from say Twitter/X or Bluesky outside of being marketed as Developer focused. I think implementing more features that are specific to developers, such as integrating with Git repos, would be a great step toward making your platform more unique. For 15, this is very impressive.

good luck!

maybe you can make this into a social network, and entice people to keep posting.

if people see something interesting, maybe they want to work on it together and it becomes a job platform.

like a more interesting Ask HN