Wawandco built Scavo, a custom scavenger hunt app for their annual team retreat, using Go, HTMX, and SQLite — deployed as a single binary on one VPS via Kamal. The app featured real-time leaderboards, photo uploads, QR code scanning, and a simple ID-based auth system. Built in roughly four hours with AI coding assistance, it deliberately avoided over-engineering: no Postgres, no React, no OAuth. The post reflects on how AI tools accelerate boilerplate but human judgment still drives architecture decisions. The project has been open-sourced under the O'Saasy license at github.com/wawandco/scavo.
Table of contents
What We Actually BuiltThe Stack We ChoseThe Architecture Decisions That MatteredHow AI Actually HelpedThe Skeptic and the DemoThe Deploy and the EventWhat We Did NextThe Lesson for Engineering LeadersJust What Worked for UsReferences1.9K Impressions