Anonion is an anonymous opinion sharing platform that lets you ask anything to your friends, families, colleagues, etc, and receive responses from them anonymously.

People often feel hesitant to say something. We are insecure to share our deep secrets. We fear being judged for opening up. We do not want anyone to know our wild fantasies. Anonion makes it easy for people to open up in these scenarios.

Usage

1. Head over to Anonion website and click on Login to Signup.
2. Click on Create New Anonion.
3. Now type your question and click on submit.
4. Now click on the newly created question.
5. You can see all your responses on this page. You can share a tweet of your question or copy the link and send it to anyone.
6. Anyone with a link to one of your questions can send an anonymous message to you.

Backstory

I decided to participate in the hackathon 2 days back and started looking for ideas in my ideas bucket(A google keep full of project ideas). I've had this(Anonion) project idea on my to-do list for a while but never worked on it❌. Also, this was a perfect candidate for making an MVP with this less time for submission.

Tech-stack

For this project, I chose to go with a few of the technologies that I wanted to learn, but never actually did. I know it is a bad preference to have when you are on less time but I could not prevent myself from doing it. And they are

• Next JS
• Tailwind CSS
• Firebase Auth and Firestore

I used Next JS to learn about the SSR and so I chose to render all the pages that query the database on the server-side.

Features

What I've built so far is more like an MVP for the platform. I started working on it only on the 5th, Feb.

• Simple and intuitive UI.
• Sign up and ask multiple questions.
• View all the received responses.
• Share your question link.
• Delete previously asked questions.

Development and deployment

The fact that this my first project using Next JS and Tailwind CSS did not affect my development cycle significantly. I was slightly familiar with the concepts and react framework and that was enough for getting started. The Documentation on both websites was intuitive. The project setup was a no-brainer with create-next-app.

Adding Firebase Auth and Firestore were the only things that I found time-consuming. Even for that, there are plenty of resources on the web. I referred to this awesome post from LogRocket on using Firestore for SSR.

Also, I used a wide range of dependencies for a significantly small project to complete it as soon as possible.

• 🍞 react-toastify
• ⚠️ react-confirm-alert
• 🔒 next-firebase-auth
• 🔗 react-copy-to-clipboard

Vercel was the obvious choice to go with the deployment.

1. Next JS
2. Hackathon rules. 🙂

Adding the firebase-admin private key to the Vercel environment variables was quite tricky and this answer helped me through the painful process.

Future Plans

I'll be working on the project regularly and some of the features I'm planning to add are

• ☑️ Social Auth.
• ☐ Ask Polls.
• ☐ Reply to the responses of authenticated users.
• ☐ View replies.
• ☐ Choose not to receive responses for a question.
• ☐ Make certain responses and their selected replies public.
• ☐ Share on various Social Media platforms.

I hope this helps you in any way possible. Please share your opinion about the project in the comments or you can leave an anonymous opinion about the project here 😉.