Bigspinfun.com

AI helped me build a simple app

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I built a full-stack roulette game using Claude AI as my dev partner — here's what happened I work in IT (Windows admin → Linux → basic DevOps), but I haven't done full-stack work. I've started every Python book ever written and made it to about chapter 4 each time. I wanted to see if I could use Claude to go from zero to a deployed production app. Not a toy demo — a real site with user accounts, a database, Docker containers, HTTPS, and SEO. The kind of thing that would take a team weeks. What I built: bigspinfun.com — a free online roulette game with European, American, and Triple Zero variants. Straight bets, splits, streets, corners, the whole table. Animated wheel, leaderboard, user accounts with persistent balances. The stack (all generated through conversation with Claude): Next.js (SSR for SEO) Django REST Framework (auth, server-side RNG, API) PostgreSQL Nginx reverse proxy Docker Compose (4 containers) Let's Encrypt SSL AWS Lightsail ($12/mo) GitLab for source control How it actually worked: I'd describe what I wanted, Claude would build it. When things broke (constantly), I'd paste the error and Claude would diagnose it. The whole project was one long iterative conversation — not a single prompt. The messy parts nobody tells you about: Django migration files kept disappearing because they were generated inside ephemeral Docker containers. Took multiple rounds of debugging before Claude figured out the root cause. docker compose build would hang on a 512MB VPS. Turns out Next.js needs more RAM to build than a cheap server has. A + in a randomly generated database password broke the entire database connection because it corrupted the URL parser. SSL certs ended up in a -0001 directory because the temp self-signed cert was squatting on the expected path. Browsers showed "Not Secure" until we renamed the folder. What surprised me: Claude wasn't perfect — it missed things like migration files in the initial scaffolding. But it was resilient. Every error I fed back in got us closer to working. It debugged its own oversights, which is honestly how real development works anyway. What I learned: The roulette game was maybe 20% of the work. The other 80% was infrastructure — Docker networking, Nginx configs, SSL certificates, DNS propagation, environment variables, swap space. Stuff I never would have touched without an AI making it approachable. Without Claude, I would have built a static HTML page and stopped. With Claude, I shipped a full-stack app to AWS with HTTPS and SEO. The AI didn't lower the bar — it raised how far I was willing to reach. No real money, no signup required. Just spin the wheel: bigspinfun.com Happy to answer questions about the process or the stack.