365 Days of WishIT: What Building It Taught Me

Reflections from a year of building software, solving problems, and growing as an engineer.

One year ago, I git push origin main on WishIT.

Roughly a year before that time, it wasn't even meant to be a product. It was a birthday page, built for one person. Then a colleague asked for the source code. Then someone in his circle asked for it too. That's the entire origin story — no pitch deck, proof that something built for one person meant something to more than one.

I didn't know if anyone else would use it. I didn't know if I'd still be working on it a year later. I definitely didn't expect it to be still growing while I was finishing school.

It's been 365 days. Here's what actually happened.

The product changed more than once

WishIT today doesn't look like the thing I launched. The editor's been rebuilt. The templates system has been rebuilt. I've lost data during a migration and had to sit with that, fix the discipline behind it, and keep going instead of pretending it didn't happen. None of that was in the plan. All of it ended up being necessary.

The version of WishIT that exists now — WishArena, a real block editor, billing in alpha testing, proper security, actual SEO infrastructure — wasn't designed upfront. It was built in response to what broke, what people asked for, and what I learned I'd gotten wrong the first time.

What I actually learned

Shipping beats planning. Every real growth spike this year traces back to something we shipped, not something we announced. The lesson was clear: build it, ship it, people show up if it's useful.

Losing data teaches you more than losing sleep does. The migration that cost us historical WishDrop records was the worst week of the year. It also forced backup and migration discipline that everything since has depended on. I'd rather not have learned it that way, but I did.

Building alone doesn't mean building unseen. WishIT has been discovered by AI search without me asking for it, used in 85+ countries by people I've never talked to, and referenced in ways I didn't engineer. That's strange and humbling in equal measure — you build something at your desk, and it ends up somewhere you can't see.

"Done" doesn't happen. Shippable does. I don't think WishIT has ever felt finished, not for a single week of the year. It's felt shippable, over and over. That turned out to be the right bar.

If you want the visual version of this year, there's a short anniversary film.

Where this leaves me

I graduated this year, and that's changed the shape of my time more than I expected. WishIT is still one part of a longer thing I've been building since 2020 — six years now, back when this started as a t-shirt brand in secondary school that just needed a website. That thread runs under all of it: WishIT, NFORSHIFU234 Dev (the studio I run under NFORSHIFU LOGICFORGE LTD), and this blog. It's still one person figuring out how to build — just with a degree finished and more room to focus.

For year two, WishIT keeps shipping — it's not going anywhere. But I'm putting more of my attention into HealthHub AI, the triage project that grew out of my final-year research. It's earlier-stage and needs more of my hands right now than WishIT does at this point. Expect to hear more about it here.

Year two starts now. I don't have it fully mapped out — if this year taught me anything, it's that the map changes anyway. But for year two, I'm focused on more shipping, more honesty about what breaks, and more building things that are actually useful to the people who show up. I'm grateful for everyone who used WishIT this year and for everyone who's followed along with how it got built. September is Founder's Month here — six years of building, properly told. WishIT anniversary week is the warm-up.

— IAMNOTSHIFU

*Read the product story: 365 Days of WishIT: From a Birthday Page to Emotional Tech.

Read the engineering story: 365 Days of WishIT: The Engineering Story Behind It.*