The de-facto standard for event invitations at Stanford is Partiful. It’s a great platform: it looks cool and makes gathering RSVPs easy. But what if you want less of a party vibe, and more of an air of mystery? Less “join the herd” and more “you, individually, have been chosen.” For that, you might need Cordially.
There was of course a time before Partiful, when Paperless Post was dominent. And they got something right: you would receive a skeumorphic envelope in your inbox, and there was a fancy letter-opening animation on their website. That felt special. So, after throwing a handful of parties myself and hand-writing an awful lot of invitations, I decided I could take the best ideas from pop culture and these competing platforms to make something better.
Then I decided to wait several years until I was at the Recurse Center and staring at a deadline for the Palantir Build Challenge. And thus naturally, I ended up building my fancy-shmancy invite platform in a mad two-day sprint on top of a data platform best known for its military-industrial use-case.
With the strict time constraints, I didn’t get to make Cordially the visually stunning platform that I had initially envisioned. But I learned loads: I built the app in Python’s FastHTML as another waystop on my roving quest to find a good web framework, and I was able to concretize Palantir’s product in my mind, where otherwise it would just be a swirling, intangible, mildly sinister idea in my head.
One day I may rewrite Cordially to be gorgeous and production-ready. But for the time being, you will have to be satisfied with the code and a video walkthrough.