The first real Hatch & Build project wasn't planned as a product. It was planned as a moment: a showcase event at my church in July 2025, a big screen at the front of the sanctuary, and an idea I couldn't let go of — what if everyone in the room could draw on that screen at the same time, from their own phone?
The catch, as always: I'm a theology student. I had no coding background, no team, and — because the event date was fixed — about three days.
What I wanted was simple to describe: a QR code goes up on the big screen. Anyone points their phone camera at it and gets a small drawing pad in their browser — no app to install, no account to create, because you will lose a room full of people the moment you ask them to download something. Whatever they draw floats onto the shared wall on the big screen, instantly, alongside everyone else's drawings.
"Simple to describe" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Real-time anything is the kind of feature that developers describe with words like websockets, and I described with the words "the drawing should just... appear."
I built it the way I build everything: with AI tools as my hands, and me as the person who knows what the thing is supposed to feel like. My job was to describe precisely, test ruthlessly, and refuse to accept "technically works" as "done." The AI's job was to produce the code I couldn't write myself.
Three days is not enough time to build something good. It is, it turns out, enough time to build something alive — if you cut everything that doesn't serve the moment. No user accounts. No gallery of past drawings. No settings page. Phone draws, wall shows, that's the product. Every time I was tempted by a feature, the question was: will the congregation notice its absence on Sunday? The answer was always no.
The QR code went up on the sanctuary screen, and there is a particular few seconds of terror available only to people who have shipped something untested at scale: the gap between "everyone is scanning" and "something appears." Then the first drawing floated up onto the wall. Then ten more. Kids drew, adults drew, and the screen filled up with a congregation's worth of doodles — each one appearing live, from a phone, onto the wall, exactly like the picture I'd had in my head.
Nobody in that room asked what framework it was built on. That's the thing I keep relearning: users experience the moment, not the machinery.
That three-day build became Drawing Playground, which now exists as a free tool anyone can use — for weddings, parties, team events, anywhere you have a big screen and a crowd with phones. It also powers the Live Wall on this site's home page, where visitors can leave a drawing for whoever comes next.
From egg to drawing wall. More hatches on the build log and on Instagram.