PencilPear 🍐✏️ a tiny shared space for friends to leave a little piece of themselves.

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend

What I Built

Have you ever wanted to share a random thought, doodle something silly, or leave a little note for a friend without starting another conversation?
A shared digital sticky-note workspace for forgetful study buddies. Drop reminders, sketch ideas, and yell "DO THE ASSIGNMENT" right onto each other's desktop screens in real time.
That's the idea behind PencilPear.

I built PencilPear for a friend as a lightweight collaborative sticky-note app where we can write, draw, and erase on the same shared board in real time. Instead of sending every little thought as a separate message, we can simply open our board and leave something there.

Each room has its own board, so different spaces stay separate. The board state persists, allowing us to return to what we've created, and the app integrates with Electron for a desktop experience.

It's a small project, but the idea behind it is simple: friendship doesn't always need a big conversation. Sometimes, a tiny doodle is enough.

Demo

Try PencilPear here: pencilpear.vercel.app

Code

Explore the source code on GitHub:

anweshasingh-dev/pencilpear

How I Built It

I built PencilPear with help from OpenAI Codex as my AI coding assistant.

The application brings together a shared drawing and writing board, real-time collaboration, room-based separation, persistent board state, and Electron integration for a desktop app experience.

I worked toward keeping the experience lightweight and focused on one thing: making it easy for two friends to share a small creative space without unnecessary complexity.

Codex helped me work through the implementation, but the product idea came from a simple question: What if staying connected with a friend could feel as easy as leaving a sticky note on their desk?
note: PencilPear does not uses an open-weight AI model or an open-source AI framework inside the application.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

Open innovation makes it easier for developers to experiment, learn, and turn small ideas into working projects without needing a large team or a big budget.

For a project like PencilPear, that matters because the goal isn't to build another complicated communication platform. It's to explore a small, personal idea and make it real.

Using an AI coding assistant helped me move from an idea to a publicly accessible project. Having the source code available on GitHub also means other developers can explore the implementation, learn from it, and potentially build on it.

PencilPear is a reminder that useful software doesn't always have to solve a massive problem. Sometimes, it just needs to make one little thing better for someone you care about.