Shelved - Media Collection Tracker

Shelved is a privacy-focused media collection tracker built with Rails 8 and Hotwire Native. It was designed for people who want to track what they own and where it lives — not what they’ve read or watched socially. It shipped in a day with AI-assisted development, ran on Fly.io for a while, and is now parked due to hosting costs.

What It Did

Unlike Goodreads or LibraryThing, Shelved focused on physical collections:

• Location tracking — “Which bookshelf?”, “Lent to whom?”
• Barcode scanning — Quick ISBN entry via mobile camera
• Multi-format support — Books, movies, TV shows with cross-references
• API metadata — Auto-populate from Google Books, TMDb, Open Library
• Privacy-first — No analytics, no social features, no tracking

Technical Architecture

Rails 8 with PostgreSQL, deployed to Fly.io. Hotwire Native provided iOS and Android apps without separate codebases — the mobile apps added camera access for barcode scanning and offline browsing. The data model was straightforward: books, shelves, loans, and cross-references between media types.

Why It’s Parked

Fly.io’s hosting costs made it hard to justify for a personal tool. The app worked well — I used it daily for months — but running a Rails app with a PostgreSQL database for one household wasn’t economically sustainable. The code is intact and could be revived with a cheaper hosting approach or a move to SQLite.

What I Learned

Shelved became a blog post about AI-assisted development — shipping a real Rails app in a day, and discovering that “AI makes it fast” really means “AI makes the typing fast.” The decisions still take exactly as long as they need to.