KHOI

E-commerce CMS

Khoi Nguyen — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This project was built as part of my Week 5 of learning Go. You can read the blog to learn about my motivation building this!

Features

Admin login page at /login.

Try the demo at samplestore.khoiuna.info/login.
Login with username admin & password admin123.

Admin dashboard to add & edit products.

Preorder notification through Discord.

Tech

Frontend: Built with NextJS and TailwindCSS.

Backend: Built with Golang, Go Fiber, Gorm and SQLite.

PlatoPunk

Khoi Nguyen — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Read more on why and how I host my own ActivityPub server.

LynkTrade

Khoi Nguyen — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

As a developer, I encountered a recurring challenge – the clunkiness and complexity of existing website builders. These tools, while powerful, often posed a steep learning curve for non-tech-savvy users, particularly small business owners. This sparked the idea for LynkTrade, a platform designed to simplify the process of creating a website, empowering entrepreneurs to establish their online presence effortlessly. This led to the launch of LynkTrade in Summer 2023.

Problem

Wix, Squarespace, and similar platforms were the go-to choices for many. However, for the average small business owner, navigating through these platforms felt akin to solving a puzzle. The need for a solution that streamlined the process became apparent, and thus, LynkTrade was born.

Solution

The core philosophy behind LynkTrade was elegance in simplicity. I envisioned a platform where users could build their site in just 3 three steps.

Sign Up: LynkTrade kicks off with a straightforward onboarding process. Users can sign up and fill in their business name (and might be able to choose from a variety of professionally designed themes in the future).
Customize with Ease: The heart of LynkTrade lies in its user-friendly customization options. No coding expertise required – users can effortlessly tailor their website to fit their brand, adding content and tweaking content with a few clicks.
Go Live in Minutes: The final step is as simple as hitting the ‘Publish’ button. In under two minutes, users transition from a concept to a live website – a game-changer for small businesses eager to establish their digital footprint.

Result: One Customer at a Time

The journey of LynkTrade hasn’t been without its challenges, but witnessing the platform’s impact on small businesses has been incredibly rewarding. One success story stands out – two customers who, thanks to LynkTrade, now effortlessly manages their online presence, paying a monthly subscription for the service.

One of them knew about me on NextDoor. We met. I showed her the demo. She liked it and paid!

Conclusion

I don’t know how far LynkTrade can go, but this project shows that sometimes, the most profound solutions emerge from simplicity.

NFC Orange

Khoi Nguyen — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I blogged about this project. If interested, you can read the blog here.

Problem

NFC Orange addresses the inefficiencies of traditional career fairs by digitizing the process, eliminating the need for paper resumes, and providing a modern solution for students and recruiters to connect seamlessly.

Solution

We replace paper resumes with NFC cards that students can tap on recruiters’ phones to share their resumes. We also built a NFC reader that students could tap their card on. The reader would read the card and save it to the Recruiter dashboard we built.

_{NFC Orange’s Recruiter Dashboard}

During the course of the project, we had added more features like adding the Analytics feature for students to track how many times their profile has been viewed.

Team

Worked in a team of two:

Avish Yadav — MBA in Global Business.

Tech stack

Front end: React, NextJS, Tailwind CSS.

Back end: NodeJS, Express.

Hardware: Particle Boron (for sending HTTP requests), RC522 (for reading the NFC cards).

Why we failed

Even though we successfully raised fund for this project from our Dean of College Business & Technology, we failed due to lack of product market fit. We had some early user’s interests (by handing out free cards and posting on social media), but there was no word-of-mouth or engagement.

Here is how often people tap their cards. As you can see, most of these came from me or Avish showing that not a lot have used it after receiving the cards.

In addition, students still prefer taking their resume to the NFC cards, since recruiters have QR codes for students to scan and apply directly on their company’s job portal.

ChekChat

Khoi Nguyen — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

ChekChat was my 1st attempt to build a startup. You can try the live demo with these credentials or register for one:

Email: john@example.com — Password: John123456
Email: jane@example.com — Password: Jane123456
Email: ben@example.com — Password: Ben1234567
Email: tom@example.com — Password: Tom1234567

Problem

Most team collaboration apps like Slack, Discord, Trello, etc. requires users to toggle between apps causing context switching.

For example, developers use Trello to work on a task, then go to Slack to discuss → Users have to toggle between Slack and Trello → Causes context switching.

→ Context switching distracts developers to work on tasks.

Solution

Built an app that focused on tasks where users can chat in a room made for that specific task.

Team

Worked in a team of three to build the app.

Simon Hu — MBA in Project Management
Junnosuke Noiri — BBA in Computer Information Systems

Tech stack

Coded the front end with React/NextJS, Redux, and Material UI hosted on Vercel.

Built the back end with SocketIO and Express deployed to Heroku.

Why we failed

Our team lost commitment over time due to not involving users in the process. Actually, we built before validating.

Seeing no validation was probably the biggest reason.

Shooting Numbers

Khoi Nguyen — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Birthday Piano

Khoi Nguyen — Fri, 17 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I also launched it on Product Hunt. Check it out and upvote!

The story behind

During COVID, the whole university was in lockdown. Having too much spare time, I started to learn web dev: HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

One of my early projects — CodeBros — built with Bootstrap and jQuery.

I’ve always been in love with music so my original thought was if I could build a small simple piano with HTML and CSS. And, I realized I could! I was really proud of my CSS skill!

I started to record piano notes from GarageBand and wrote the JS code to play the sound.

Realizing my friend’s birthday coming up, I had the urge to finish the project and tried to make the piano play the Happy Birthday song.

The result

I created a piano that could play Happy Birthday on the web! After finished playing the song, users could open a gift to see a motivational quote. However, the code was quite messy.

Two years later, having more experience, I revisited the project and added SoundJS, ViteJS, TypeScript, and refactored the code to look nicer.

Realizing this project could be for anyone to send a birthday message, I added the backend for users to customize their wish instead of a quote.

Finally, I designed the icon for the site and launched on Product Hunt!