At the side of my side project… I’ve built a side project! It’s given a mix of satisfaction and anticipation. That particular feeling that arrives when you complete something. Get it over the line. Ready to put out into the world.
Not exactly the triumphant feeling that you maybe imagined when starting out. More like still blinking at the screen several hours passed your normal bed time, wondering whether what you’ve built makes any sense to anyone else. That was the feeling I had finishing Red Lantern Readings last Thursday evening.
Red Lantern Readings is an app-like fortune telling site. You ask a question (or give it a mood, a situation, a crossroads) and it responds with a reading. Symbolic, thoughtful, most of the time on point. Using the phrasing of an ancient Chinese scholar. Exactly as it should be.
The reason I built it
I have another project (called VibeQuiz) that I’ve been beavering away with for almost a year. I’ve spent a lot of time on that one. Invested a lot. Only, in the next few months I hope to monetise it. Therefore, it will need a payment gateway; Stripe, Supabase, the whole integration.
Before I wire any of that into something I actually care about, I want to understand it properly. Not from a tutorial. Not in theory. By building something real and testing it in a live environment. A real use case. Red Lantern Readings is that thing.
I’ve been making web-related things since 2015, when CamZhu.com started as a platform for digital art built around Chinese characters. Most of those early experiments didn’t work the way I intended. Yet, all of them taught me something useful. This was the same logic. Choose a contained idea. Build it out properly. Learn what you need to learn in a low-stakes environment. The plan is to carry that knowledge somewhere it really matters.
To bring a Zen Buddhist aspect, it’s a more deliberate version of beginner’s mind. You’re not just stumbling into the unknown. You’re choosing to go there on purpose, so the stumbling happens where the risk is low rather than somewhere it costs you more.
Why Chinese astrology specifically?
It was genuinely interesting to me. Being invested in the thing you’re creating matters a lot. I have previously contended with the Chinese zodiac system. This year is the year of the Horse.
On being interested, if you’re going to build something purely as a technical exercise, you still have to live with it for weeks. Better to build something you would actually use. I’ve long been drawn to Chinese astrology not as fortune-telling, but as an additional framework for thinking. The system doesn’t really predict anything concrete. What it does is force you to sit with a question.
This is all about approaching a situation symbolically rather than literally. That shift, even a brief one, can be useful. The red lantern image felt right too. In Chinese culture, lanterns guide. They welcome. They mark a threshold between one state and another.
What it is, and what it isn’t
Red Lantern Readings isn’t a replacement for reflection. It won’t solve your problems or tell you what to do. What it might offer is a different angle. A prompt to thinking differently.
Behind the curtain, it’s also a working integration of tech platforms, Supabase, Stripe, GitHub and Netlify. It allowed me to experiment with building a payment gateway, at a very low cost. The only outlay was $11 for the domain name. I now understand the process well enough to deploy elsewhere. The project did what I needed it to do. Anything else is a bonus.
If you’re curious, go and try it. Bring a real question. See what comes back.