BearWithMe is a playful web app that delivers a daily bear photo paired with a personalized name and uplifting tone. I originally built it as a small, feel-good project, but over time it became a great exercise in making a frontend app more production-ready.

The app is built with React and JavaScript, with styling in SCSS. It fetches bear images from Pexels and presents them in a simple, focused interface designed to highlight the daily image. I also added graceful fallback behavior so the experience still works when external API requests fail.

A key improvement was moving Pexels access from the browser to a Vercel serverless endpoint. This keeps API credentials out of client-side bundles, returns only the data the UI needs, and adds lightweight protections like short response caching and basic rate limiting. I also handled deployment edge cases and improved stability around missing image data so the app doesn’t crash when upstream responses are incomplete.

BearWithMe is a small project by scope, but it reflects the way I like to build: simple UX, clean implementation, and practical attention to reliability and security. You can try it live in the browser and explore the code on GitHub.