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8 articles
I added a deliberate 10-second loading delay to my blog for two weeks because a podcast told me the slow web was the future. Here's what the analytics, my inbox, and my own guilt had to say about it.
I locked my three most-visited tutorials behind a newsletter signup for one month and tracked every number that mattered. Traffic cratered, signups exploded, and my inbox got spicy. Here's the full dataset and whether I'd do it again.
I locked my longest project write-ups behind a $3 paywall for a month, mostly to see if anyone would notice. One person did — and paid. Here's the full breakdown of traffic, revenue, and the surprisingly emotional emails I got.
I tracked every dollar, every outage, and every migration scramble from two years of running josephkhan.me on free-tier everything. Spoiler: 'free' cost me about $400 and a very bad Tuesday in March.
I spent a week 'improving' my RSS reader instead of shipping the three features people actually asked for. Here's the hour-by-hour breakdown of how refactoring became my favorite form of avoidance — and the guardrails I built to stop it.
I went through public job-hunt threads and found five portfolios with zero custom design that landed offers anyway. The common thread wasn't polish — it was shipping. Here's the case for deploying the rough version.
josephkhan.me has gone through more rebuilds than a Detroit assembly line, and each version failed in its own special way. Here's the honest autopsy, version by version, and what actually changed once I started paying attention to how people read.
A URL shortener, a dead SaaS, a Discord bot, and seven others get scored on skills gained versus hours sunk. If you're choosing your next weekend build, this rubric might save you three months of your life.