Horus
Project Overview
What is Horus?
I built a web app to track my gym workouts. I decided to create my own because I don’t enjoy the existing solutions and my previous method of tracking workouts (excel sheet) was extremely inefficient and didn’t scale well.
I also did this for fun. This was a for-fun learning project. As a result, this is not a vibe-coded app. I’m using AI as a teacher, and not as a tool to generate code for me, because learning how to actually build things myself matters to me. I want to understand how everything works. Also I’m trying not to become useless and obsolete.
App Features
What does this app do?
Features
- Full workout management including creating, viewing, editing, and deleting workouts
- Structured data models for workouts, exercises, sets, and historical performance tracking
- Persistent storage of workout data in a database
- Secure authentication with protected access so only signed-in users can use the app
- Rate-limited authentication requests to prevent abuse and brute-force login attempts
- User-specific data isolation so each user only sees their own workouts
- Automatic calculation of workout metrics such as total volume and personal records
Validation and Security
- Validated workout forms with both client-side and server-side validation to prevent invalid or incomplete input
- Robust error handling for validation failures, failed requests, and database-level issues
- Type-safe data validation using schemas
- Secure handling of API keys and environment variables
UX/UI
- User feedback through toast notifications and inline messages for important actions
- Responsive UI designed for mobile-first usage and smaller screen sizes
- Customizable interface with three theme variants
- Smooth UX states including loading, success, error, and empty states
Architecture & Implementation
- Efficient data fetching patterns to keep the UI responsive and reduce unnecessary requests
- Reusable component-based UI architecture for maintainability and scalability
- Typed API layer for end-to-end type safety between client and backend
- Database schema design optimized for workout history and progression tracking
- Exercise lookup / registry system to standardise exercise names and track PRs correctly
- Modular project structure separating features, hooks, and data logic
Technologies Used
How I built this app
Tech Stack
- Next.js 16
- React 19
- Typescript
- Convex
- Better Auth
- Redis
- Zod
- Tailwindcss
- shadcn/ui
Why Next.js?
I used Next.js simply because I wanted to learn it. I wanted to learn how to build a full-stack app and focus on new things like authentication or working with a database, while using familiar tools like React and TypeScript as a foundation. I also chose a web app because its faster and easier to prototype and get running compared to using something like Flutter or Kotlin. In the future, I plan to build a native mobile version of this app.
