slowdown.lol

Before cheats, before any of the reverse engineering, there was slowdown.lol. Two years ago, with kipro, and it is still the project I measure everything else against.

A biography site. You made yourself a page, filled it in, and that page was you: who you were, what you were into, the links that mattered. Biography sites are a strange corner of the internet because they are entirely about the person writing them, and the whole product is whether it feels like them or not.

That was the hard part and the interesting part. Not the database, not the deploy, but getting a page to feel like somebody. I learned more about interfaces from that than from anything else I have touched.

kipro and I built it together. Two people, no team, and a lot of the work was just deciding what the site was supposed to be before writing any of it. I did the front, the pages, the layout, the way it moved; the rest we figured out between us as we went.

It is the first project where I had to care about something beyond whether it ran. If a profile looked wrong, it was wrong, even if the code was fine.

It closed recently. Not because it went wrong and not because people stopped caring, but because neither of us had the time to keep it alive, and a site like that needs somebody behind it every single day.

Watching something you built go quiet is a different kind of lesson than the ones you get from code. It taught me what a project actually costs, which is time, and that a good idea with no hours behind it does not survive.