Every five years, Kerala votes. I grew up there, follow the politics closely, and every election cycle the group chat fills up with confident predictions — which alliance will sweep, which sitting MLA is done, which constituency is going to surprise everyone. I wanted to have some fun with those predictions. So I built a game.
I called it Nokkam — a Malayalam word that roughly means “let’s take a look.”
The main design goal was effortlessness. I imagined someone discovering the link during their 4 o’clock tea break, tapping through their picks without once thinking about signing up. So I skipped accounts entirely. Predictions are stored in localStorage. On first visit, the app picks a name for you — something like GrandAyurveda48 or QuietMonsoon7 — and that becomes your identity for the game. Most people won’t clear their browser storage in three weeks. That was enough.
The candidate data came from opendatakerala. Each of Kerala’s 140 constituencies has LDF, UDF, and NDA candidates running on their party’s election symbol — the hammer and sickle, the hand, the lotus. I sourced SVGs for the twelve most common symbols from Wikimedia Commons and embedded them. The prediction cards felt like a ballot paper.
The frontend is React with Vite and TypeScript, deployed on Cloudflare Pages. The backend is a Go binary with SQLite. I already had a VPS running other homelab services, so adding one more container had zero friction. I built the whole thing with Claude Code — evenings spent mostly describing what I wanted and reviewing what came back.
The backend scaffold went up on a Friday (April 4). By Sunday the frontend had candidate cards and a pick flow, and somehow also: full Malayalam i18n, an animated profile screen, admin tooling, and brand assets. That Sunday was productive.
The rest of the first week was cleanup — fixing a crowd data dedup bug, adding the skip feature, wiring share cards in both languages. On April 9 — election day itself — I deployed the scoring infrastructure and left it dormant, waiting for May 4.
Between the vote and the results I redesigned the dark theme, built an Instagram Reel generation pipeline, and ported the game to Reddit’s Devvit platform. The app kept growing past what I’d originally planned.
I promoted it in two places: a post on r/Kerala announcing the game, and a native Reddit app built with Devvit that let people play without leaving their feed. The r/Kerala post drove 744 predictions in a single day — roughly half the total, in 24 hours. Then Reddit moved on, as Reddit does.
On May 4, when the results came in, most of us found out how wrong we were — UDF won 103 seats against predictions of a much closer race.
nokkam.lol is still live. This opens a series on building it — the Malayalam i18n system, crowd wisdom with anonymous users, generating video reels from HTML, and what happened after the elections.