Grindmap Blew Up

Busy week, and a genuinely exciting one. Built something, shipped it, and for once people actually cared.

What I worked onCopied!

• grindmap: built and shipped grindmap this week, and it blew up. Posted it on X and it took off, tons of likes, reposts, saves, way more reach than anything I've posted before. Got picked up on LinkedIn too. Shipped the whole thing in a day and a half: build scripts and Vercel config, README, analytics and speed insights, Search Console verification, then a full per-user progress tracker (checkboxes, a progress meter, Clerk auth) backed by a Cloudflare Worker with Clerk JWT verification and KV storage. Merged that as its own PR. Chased down a few bugs after: cache-busting asset URLs so people weren't getting stale JS after deploys, the header incorrectly showing "Sign in" after the OAuth redirect back, made problem rows clickable to open the question directly. Later in the week added a real favicon set, internal linking to similar companies, and a GitHub Sponsors link.
• Watched Vercel Analytics the whole week, traffic just kept climbing.
• Checked WakaTime's estimate of what all the LLM API usage this year would've cost if I were paying per-token: $1,147. Grateful for flat subscriptions.
• thy-xev (this site): made the GitHub icon on project cards conditional on actually having a link, refreshed the projects section with recent work and the GSoC contribution, added hover preview images for new projects and shenanigans, and later in the week added a robots.txt ASCII easter egg and fixed a horizontal scroll bug. Also snuck in the Konami code, up up down down left right left right b a, try it on this site, something fun happens.
• xevrion (my GitHub profile README): updated selected work with recent projects, added live links for Photon, Grindmap, and Tab Shamer, restyled selected work and the fun section as image grids inspired by mooofin's layout.
• Small brain (Obsidian vault) housekeeping: rewrote my cybersecurity roadmap in a friend's terse style with a starter checklist and pwn phase, and codified vault-wide writing style rules.

What I found interestingCopied!

• Handy : free, open source, offline speech-to-text app. Want to try it out.
• discordo : a lightweight Discord TUI client, been meaning to move more of my life into the terminal.
• leetcode-company-wise-problems : company-wise LeetCode lists, grabbed this for interview prep.
• Chish's portfolio built with Zola, simple and clean, worth a look if you want something fast without a JS framework.

RandomCopied!

Played a ton of Minecraft with the group this week, one of those weeks where the server was always full at 2am. Chish also talked me into trying the Nightfall Craft modpack, we loaded in, played for 20 minutes, and uninstalled it, boring.

Also, unrelated to Minecraft: finally killed the Tree Sentinel in actual Elden Ring, the guy who made me rage quit the game entirely a while back. Small personal victory.

Chased an aurora at 2am because someone said the seed had one, worth it.

Someone on the server has actually been building a proper mansion, half-timbered walls, a nether-brick sculpture out front, the whole thing looks incredible at both sunset and dusk.

Also learned GPG encryption/decryption properly for the first time.

Watched Michael (2026) off my self-hosted arr stack, and lost horribly at a Skribbl.io clone Anish built as a TUI, drew a guitar when the word was harbor.