It's a (now more than 20 years old) TV tracking website and community.

I've been using Claude 4.5 Opus (now 4.6) more and more these days modernizing and redesigning sections that haven't been touched for a decade or two. I don't trust LLMs much, but by breaking the work into small, self-contained tasks and testing constantly - I'm making surprisingly fast progress.

I've dedicated this week to some maintenance tasks that are long overdue (mainly modernization of the code and the database), kinda delaying the inevitable (which is to work on harder tasks in my todo - like adding features to the mobile apps).

In addition to "no one to bounce ideas off" - no one to really share the pain and responsibility with when there are problems. It's all on you.

Thankfully, my users are very generous with their feedback, so when I do in fact do a "nice job" - I'm told so :)

For how long have you been building solo?

After 20 years, for me, I can tell you this - what helps me the most is exercising regularly (ideally on all weekdays) AND having kids.

Because of the kids, I rarely have the time to feel lonely and the regular physical exercises keep me in a (fairly) good mental state.

It felt the worst in my first years of solo dev, when all I did was work and hardly spent any time to socialize and take care of myself.

I'm sure it'll get better for you too as your project evolves and your life along with it.

https://win32.run/

Good times.

While developing the dark mode theme for my mobile app, I experimented with pure black background first.

It looked off.

I couldn't figure out why it looked off (design wise, but also seemed weirdly hard to read) until I played with a bunch of other mobile apps with dark mode (which I used already and liked) and noticed their backgrounds are not black.

Then I just tried a couple of shades of "almost black" and the improvement was huge - easier on the eyes and more pleasurable to read.

I don't have a scientific explanation why this is the case, just I wanted to kinda directly answer the question with my anecdotal experience of why I do it.

A lot of them say, pretty early on, “don’t use pure black or pure white, period”

And yes, it's returning 429 ...

Here is a screenshot from my self hosted Matomo installation for my traffic today up until now:

https://i.imgur.com/WcfQKdT.png

Firefox blocks most analytics scripts by default, so these articles rely on very skewed data.

Any other devs with self hosted tracking solutions want to share how their browser stats look like?

The other challenge is that most bots use Chrome as their UA string, so any bots you fail to filter out will inflate Chrome's numbers.

I actually see more traffic from Pale Moon than from Edge. Edge looks dead.