Visualising the magic

Of all the things that make me happy about our new site, the one that tops them all is the Network effects visualisation.

I’ve wanted to build something like this for ages, but I never knew how and didn’t have the time to invest in learning the necessary skills. Past attempts were, shall we say, unfruitful.

However, I know how to define a product and its features, how to design an interface and its experience, and how to place everything in the proper context.

So I fired up my IDE and AI assistant and began sculpting this feature into existence. It came together quickly, but the refinement and performance optimisations took some time, as expected.

I also learned to be much more specific with my requests and frequently had to troubleshoot its decision-making, or lack thereof, in response.

If you follow my posts on LinkedIn, you may have noticed a particularly fraught exchange with its cheerful demeanour and programmatic indifference.

But we made it there in the end.

All told, I probably invested 24 hours in building it. And just this morning, a friend said something that unlocked the final missing feature: a toggle to 10x, 100x, or 1,000x the numbers.

I’ll explain the significance of the underlying concepts in the next post.