Banshawali

What it is

“Banshawali” is the Nepali word for a recorded family lineage. The app lets a family build, browse, and maintain its family tree — and was designed so many different families and communities could use it on the same platform, each one private to itself. I built it as a solo project with the intent of launching it as a SaaS.

My role

Solo — backend, frontend, data model, and infrastructure.

Technical decisions

• Shared-schema multi-tenancy keyed on family_id. Every record belongs to a family, and all backend logic filters by family first, so one family’s data can never surface inside another’s tree.
• JWT-based authentication over a Django REST Framework API, with PostgreSQL for storage, containerised with Docker on AWS.
• An interactive tree built with React Flow on the frontend, so people can navigate and explore their lineage visually rather than reading a flat list.

Challenges

Modelling lineage honestly. The hard part wasn’t the code — it was the data model, and specifically how to represent women who marry out of the family. Once a daughter marries, she starts her own household and belongs to a different lineage, so a naïve tree either duplicates people or grows without bound. I drew a deliberate boundary: record one generation past a daughter — her husband and her children — and stop there, since the next generation belongs to a different family’s tree. Getting that rule right was the difference between a tree that reflected real family structure and one that didn’t.

Stretching into the frontend. This project landed while I was actively expanding my frontend skills, and building an interactive, navigable family tree with React Flow was a big jump from the backend-heavy work I was used to. Wiring up the visual tree was the steepest part of the learning curve — and the most satisfying once it worked.

Outcome

Built end to end on my own as a potential SaaS for families and communities. I ultimately decided not to pursue it commercially, so it never took on paying customers — but it remains a genuine exercise in multi-tenant design, domain modelling, and frontend work. The repository is public.

Tech stack

Django REST Framework · React · React Flow · PostgreSQL · JWT · Docker · AWS

Code

It was hosted while I was exploring it as a SaaS; I later let the domain lapse and took the live site down. The code is public, split across two repositories:

• Frontend — React + React Flow
• Backend — Django REST Framework