Dopastep — live focus rooms for body doubling, built on Next.js 16

[androidwangchong]

Dopastep — https://dopastep.com — a focus app where you work through a task alongside other people in a live room.

Built solo on Next.js 16.2.10 / React 19.2.4, deployed on Vercel.

What it does: you name the thing you've been avoiding, it gets broken into steps small enough that starting isn't a decision, and then you can drop into a live focus room and work in synced focus/break cycles with whoever else is there. No camera, no chat, no booking, no partner matching. You can browse rooms and see real occupancy without an account.

A couple of Next-specific notes, in case they're useful to anyone building something similar:

• The room pages are the interesting part — every visitor in a room has to agree on which phase the shared timer is in, so the phase is derived from a single server-held start time rather than per-client timers. That removes a whole class of "my timer says 3 minutes, yours says 5" bugs and survives refreshes and late joins for free.
• Rooms are public-readable without auth, so the browse and room-preview paths are server-rendered and cacheable, and only taking a seat needs a session. Keeping "look around" and "join" as separate trust levels made the caching story much simpler than gating the whole route.

Launched in July 2026 and still early — outside one scheduled session a day the rooms are often empty, and the UI says so rather than showing an inflated number.

Feedback on the room UX especially welcome.