The designation quiz you took. The character generator that rolled your stats and told you which Foundation you'd qualify for. The stat screen that ticks up while you read. None of that came out of a box. I wrote it, from scratch.
This whole site runs on software I built over the last few months, in a language called Elixir. So does charlieforet.com, my other site, off the exact same codebase. The short reason: I got tired of renting my readers, my store, and my email list from a stack of tools that each owned a slice of the operation, and not one of which had ever read a word I wrote.
The reason the quiz reacts without a page reload, and the character sheet fills itself in live, is a piece of the Phoenix framework called LiveView. It let me build every interactive thing on this site without standing up a separate JavaScript app to run it. For one person maintaining everything, that was the whole ballgame.
I'm writing the long version as a series, eight posts taking the machine apart in public: how one codebase runs two completely separate sites, how I left WordPress without torching five years of search rankings, how the store and the newsletter actually work, and the parts that broke on the way. The failures get equal airtime.
The full story lives on the other site, and it starts here: I stopped renting my readers →. If you'd rather listen than read, that post links the podcast version too.
Or skip all that and go poke at the thing itself: take the designation quiz and find your Foundation . Same engine.
