Background Project|Back in 2017, I was invited by my friend Fadli Mubarak, founder of Jakarta Nyastra, to attend a poetry declamation event. At the end of the event, I noticed that many participants didn’t have a proper online space to showcase their work. A few tried with Blogspot, but most found the technical aspects too challenging.

Background Project|I decided to build a platform where creators could easily share their works without technical hurdles. Since my knowledge of literature was limited, I reached out to Fadli Mubarak, Galeh Pramudianto, and Muhammad Taufik, all active literary figures, to help me ground the platform in the community.

Version 1 Introduction|At version 1, I built it with PHP, jQuery, and MySQL as the database, and deployed it on shared hosting. I had little to no knowledge of UI/UX at that time, which resulted in a clunky interface that was far from intuitive. Still, this first version was an important starting point and laid the groundwork for future improvements.

Features

• Create Content

  Feature V1 – Create Content|Users can publish and share their own literary works directly on the platform.

• Follow Each Other

  Feature V1 – Follow System|Users can follow other writers to keep up with their latest posts and activities.

• Writer Profile

  Feature V1 – Writer Profile|Each writer has a personal profile page to showcase their works and identity.

Version 2 Introduction|At version 2, I decided to refactor everything from pure PHP to Laravel, as it provided a cleaner structure and felt much safer for the platform’s growth. I also migrated from shared hosting to a GCP VPS, which gave me the freedom to fully manage and configure the server. At the same time, I completely redesigned the messy UI from version 1 into something cleaner and more usable.

Added Features

• Genre Selection

  Added Feature V2 – Genre Selection|Users can categorize their works by genre, such as poem, short story, review, or stage play.

• Wisataliterasi

  Added Feature V2 – Wisataliterasi|Users can explore the 'Wisataliterasi' feature to showcase and interpret real world locations within their works.

• Community

  Added Feature V2 – Community|Users can discover and connect with the nearest art communities.

• Events

  Added Feature V2 – Events|Users can participate in writing events and compete for prizes.

• Library

  Added Feature V2 – Library|Users can browse a list of books available in the Penakota Library. At that time, Penakota was given space by Leitstar Art Space, which we transformed into a community library.

Version 3 Introduction|At version 3, I refactored the entire codebase into separate services: Laravel as a dedicated backend for RESTful APIs with stateful Sanctum authentication, and Nuxt.js for the client side. I also separated static content from the VPS and moved it to Amazon S3. To ensure reliability, I integrated New Relic for monitoring server health, resource usage, and application performance. During this phase, I also migrated the infrastructure from GCP to Vultr due to cost considerations. In addition, I carried out a full redesign based on Google Analytics data showing that over 95% of users accessed the site from mobile devices so I focused on a mobile first experience and kept the desktop version same with mobile.

Added Features

• Books

  Added Feature V3 – Books|User can gather all their creations into a single book.

Exploration|Like I mentioned above, Penakota will always be my playground. Right now (Aug 2025), I’m using it as a case study to learn React Native and transform the platform into a mobile app. Along the way, Im experimenting with new features such as Spotify style lyric matching and art visualizations powered by OpenAI and Stable Diffusion, pushing Penakota beyond just text into a richer, multimedia experience.