Introducing Yfirlit

Finally! 🥳 I've started working on this project about two months ago and I just released the first beta version yesterday. It's now in a state I'm happy with and I want to talk about the app a bit.

It's also the first (bigger) side project I managed to release and I can't wait to keep working on it!

Yfi-what?

Why the name Yfirlit you may ask? Well, it sounds cool. But actually the name is icelandic and stands for overviews. And Yfirlit is foremost an app to get an overview of your media.

Sidenote: I may or may not have listened to Björk while trying to find a fit name for the project. 🎶

The idea

I LOVE to keep track of things, organizing myself and creating lists or sheets. But it's slowly starting to become a tedious task and I wanted to solve this problem.

Sure, there are already great services out there like Backloggery to keep track of your video games. But it's only for video games. And I want to track board games, TV series or books too.

So the idea was the following:

It's time to organize and keep track of your favourite media. It doesn't matter if it's music, games, books or movies. All within one app.

Short and sweet. Entries are categorized as listen, play, read or watch. These categories are subdivided in additional subcategories:

  • listen (no subcategories for now)
  • play (board game or video game)
  • read (comic or book)
  • watch (movie or TV series)

This might change in the future, but for now I'm quite pleased with this solution. 🎉

Tech stack

The tech stack consists of technologies and frameworks I haven't worked with before. The only requirement I had was that the stack features React and GraphQL. I had some prior, positive experience using them and I wanted to dive deeper.

The frontend and backend are currently hosted on Now and the server backend is hosted on Heroku.

Current state & future plans

The app might feel a little bit barebones for now. Most of the time was spent on getting used to the stack, writing down ideas, scribbling the design, implementing basic features like authentication and setting up the deployment process.

Now that the major obstacles are out of the way, I should be able to focus more on features and polish the look and feel. I already started working on new features and I defined some of the upcoming features on the roadmap page as well.

Until next time! And as always, feel free to send any feedback or ideas to @Nharox, it is much appreciated. 🙂