Hostivio

Origin

Hostivio started in our parents’ kitchen. They run a handful of rental apartments and were losing whole evenings to spreadsheets full of reservations, guest messages, and the paperwork the Czech state asks of every host — domovní kniha, Ubyport, tourist tax.

It began as a course project at MFFUK — a guest registration form for booking — that I kept extending past the deadline because the problem was real and our parents kept hitting it. My brother David Nguyen and I sat down one weekend, started writing the rest of the system, and never really stopped.

Over time the two of us became the primary admins of our parents’ rentals. Every feature in Hostivio came out of a problem we hit running their place ourselves. Once it was working for our family, it was obvious other hosts were dealing with the same thing — so we launched it.

Role

Co-founder. ~121 commits — form architecture, accommodation fetching, multi-step UX, mobile responsiveness, CORS, NextAuth flows, and rolling out Sentry across both the Next.js front-end and the Django back-end. Built both the public guest form and the host dashboard.

Stack

• Frontend Next.js 14, TypeScript, React Hook Form + Zod, TanStack Table, react-i18next, react-signature-canvas, pdfmake
• Backend Django 5, DRF, PostgreSQL via dj-database-url
• Auth NextAuth (JWT)
• Observability Sentry across front + back, Vercel Analytics, Speed Insights

Highlights

• Multi-step guest form with handwritten signatures captured on canvas.
• i18n built in from day one — guests fill it in their own language, hosts manage in Czech.
• Admin dashboard with filtering, pagination, processing status — TanStack Table.
• UNL file generation for Ubyport, automated tourist-tax math, Czech foreigner-reporting workflows.
• Sentry instrumentation across both stacks for end-to-end tracing.

Philosophy

Every feature ships because we hit the problem ourselves. Hostivio’s job is to give hosts back the evenings we used to lose.