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Kazengo
A printable card game from your own photos.
Role
Founder, sole engineerDec 2025 – 2026
Status
Complete, taken offline in 2026
In numbers
612 commits in the first month · 6 languages
Hosted on
Self-managed Kubernetes on Hetzner
Stack
DjangoHTMXDaphnePostgreSQLAWS S3 · Lambda · SES · CloudFrontKubernetes
The problem
Thousands of family photos nobody looks at. Timeline card games are fun, but the cards are always someone else's history.
What I built
Upload photos, the app reads date and place from EXIF, you fix the gaps and pick a cover, then print a double-sided deck. The app is the factory; the game is physical.
Outcome
A complete product in one December: login, deck editor, print layout, rules, six languages. The smallest product here, and the one that needed the least maintenance.
Keep the software small when the product is physical. The best feature is the one the browser's print dialog already has.what I took from it
How it was built
Decisions
- Photos go from the browser straight to S3. A Lambda reads the EXIF date and location and renders the print sizes, so the web app never handles large files and runs on one small pod.
- Server-rendered Django with HTMX. The whole editor is small edits, "fix this date, swap this cover", and a frontend framework would have been the largest part of the codebase.
- Printing is the browser's print dialog against a CSS page layout, double-sided with the date on the back. No PDF pipeline to maintain.
- Magic-link login next to Google. The typical user makes one deck for one birthday and should never have to think about a password.
Timeline
- Dec 2025Upload pipeline, EXIF, deck editor, print layout, rules, login, six languages
- 2026Launch, small fixes, then taken offline