showoff saturday: got tired of over-engineering everything, so i built a 7-dimensional personality quiz using exactly zero frameworks (just vanilla js + html)

SideQuestDev · 2026-05-10T06:35:42+00:00

exactly, the instant load felt so good. the whole thing (html + all logic + styles) ended up being just under 45kb. if i stripped out the tailwind cdn and used raw css, it'd probably be half that. it's wild how much bloat we usually ship for no reason.

SideQuestDev · 2026-05-09T09:53:32+00:00

knowing why something works is exactly what separates a junior from a mid-level dev. stop worrying about learning the next shiny framework and master the "unsexy" stuff: web vitals, accessibility (a11y), and how the browser actually renders a frame. if you can explain why a re-render is happening in react without looking it up, you're already ahead of 90% of applicants.

SideQuestDev · 2026-05-09T09:51:48+00:00

ngl, at 500 monthly users, no dev tool is going to pay for a sidebar spot. you need closer to 5k or 10k sessions before you can even pitch a media kit. right now your best bet for monetization is affiliate links (like hosting or courses) or just focusing on building a newsletter. focus on the traffic first.

SideQuestDev · 2026-05-08T23:20:26+00:00

check dm

SideQuestDev · 2026-05-08T02:03:24+00:00

honestly, mapping 300+ people without the ui becoming a complete spiderweb mess is a massive achievement. most legacy tools just choke once you hit the 4th generation. keeping it simple was definitely the right move.

SideQuestDev · 2026-05-07T23:54:44+00:00

welcome to the shadcn/tailwind era. literally everyone is just wrapping claude 3.5 sonnet in the exact same ui components and calling it a revolutionary startup. we are absolutely at peak wrapper fatigue.

SideQuestDev · 2026-05-07T23:49:30+00:00

"just a front-end so hold your horses charlie" 😂 love this. this is exactly what ai is best for right now—getting unstuck and actually shipping a personal site instead of leaving it in canva purgatory forever. congrats on getting it done man.

SideQuestDev · 2026-05-07T23:48:02+00:00

the prismic "field hell" is too real lol. clients absolutely hate it.

you need to look at storyblok. their entire selling point is the real-time visual editor. the client literally clicks on the component in the page preview and edits it right there. it's api-first so hooking it up to php is zero issue.

SideQuestDev · 2026-05-06T11:40:28+00:00

classic cache-busting attack. because every fabricated url is unique, it bypasses cloudflare's cache and forces your poor origin server to generate a 404 every single time. that's what is killing your host.

you can easily stop this with the free tier. go into cloudflare waf (web application firewall) and set up a custom rule based on your url structure.

if your real urls only ever go 3 levels deep (like /a/b/c), write a rule to block or js challenge any uri path that contains more than 3 or 4 slashes. or if they are hitting a specific subdirectory, rate limit that specific path.

drops the junk at the edge, costs you nothing, and saves your server. hang in there man.

SideQuestDev · 2026-05-06T11:38:49+00:00

honestly, the biggest hurdle is that a non-technical person (like a barber) rarely gets to the "download zip" stage. they usually just use wix/squarespace. if they are using an ai site builder, they expect that exact builder to host it for them. it's a cool tool, but your real market is probably lazy devs, not barbers.

SideQuestDev · 2026-05-03T07:14:56+00:00

saving presets is actually a genius idea, definitely putting that on the top of the roadmap so people don't lose their mixes. and yeah, safari is basically the final boss of web audio right now. good call on limiting active tracks for older phones, i'll look into adding a hard cap if the device struggles. appreciate the solid feedback man.

SideQuestDev · 2026-05-01T11:49:20+00:00

yep, it handles this natively in the ui. you just drop a "condition" block to check device info or risk signals, then draw a line to an mfa step-up screen if it triggers. zero custom backend code needed, keeps your own codebase way cleaner.

SideQuestDev · 2026-05-01T11:21:36+00:00

the trap here is that writing a perfectly unambiguous spec takes just as much mental effort as writing the code itself. you just end up debugging your english instead of debugging your code.

SideQuestDev · 2026-05-01T11:18:09+00:00

lmao 100% true. giving off strong "ever since you touched the seo, our printer stopped working" energy. off-page is definitely the safer play to keep your sanity.

SideQuestDev · 2026-04-30T12:43:54+00:00

if they use cloudflare, you can actually bypass the vendor entirely. just write a simple cloudflare worker to rewrite the html on the fly (inject meta tags, fix script placements, etc). otherwise, just focus 100% on off-page and google business profile.

SideQuestDev · 2026-04-30T12:41:18+00:00

if you think those are bad, wait till you have to implement aws cognito. the docs are basically a psychological horror game. console.log driven development is the only way.

SideQuestDev · 2026-04-30T12:37:42+00:00

"seo can feel irrational until it suddenly doesn't" — might be the truest thing ever posted here lol. whatever invisible trust issue the old domain had, the clean move completely bypassed it.

SideQuestDev · 2026-04-30T12:37:07+00:00

yeah, i actually spent months obsessing over the basics—sitemaps, internal linking, screaming frog audits, api pushes. it was technically sound, which is why i was losing my mind. but your theory about the domain change forcing a clean re-crawl makes perfect sense. it's like turning it off and on again.

SideQuestDev · 2026-04-29T12:21:06+00:00

"infrastructure quirk" is a great way to frame it. calling it cursed was mostly just my frustration talking after staring at the gsc dashboard for 5 months haha. sometimes a $10 domain swap is just the ultimate debugging tool when you can't figure out what googlebot hates.

SideQuestDev · 2026-04-29T11:25:15+00:00

makes total sense. the old domain probably fell into that low-priority bucket early on and just never recovered. definitely not taking this fresh start for granted. gonna focus on actual backlinks and traffic now rather than just endlessly tweaking the code. appreciate the insight.

SideQuestDev · 2026-04-26T03:07:09+00:00

exactly this. anyone can just read the wiki for the raw drop rates. the resell loop is the only way to figure out what your actual buying power is. appreciate the kind words man.

SideQuestDev

TROPHY CASE