Why not? The web should be fun again
Easter eggs, a stick figure, and why making the web worth visiting is in our own hands
TL;DR The web lost some of its early magic, but that is a choice, not a law. Why I spent more time on the fun parts of this site than on its code, and why that matters now that AI summaries are how many people read.
We have the power to make the web more interesting again.
Open the start page of this site and wait a second. A stick figure beams in, hops down the three squares next to my name and pushes DOMINIKANGERER together until only D12R is left. Then it teleports away.
Nobody needs that. No metric goes up because of it. I built it anyway, and it took more of my time than the code behind this site.
Easter eggs, with the customer's OK
Back in my agency days we hid easter eggs in some of the sites we built. Always with the customer's OK, and always something that only made sense for that customer. Nobody briefed it. We added it because we liked the people we built for, and a site that winks at you feels made by someone.
This site has a few of those tooIf your system asks for reduced motion, the start page skips the animation and the city stands still. Fun should never be the reason someone can't use a page.: a city with stick figures, a car that goes faster if you ask, a hello in the developer console, and ten achievements to unlock. One of them is for reading an article to the end. You're on your way.
The summary is not the point
Somewhere along the way many sites started to look the same: same hero, same three cards, same cookie banner. Each choice is reasonable. Together they make a web that is efficient and a little boring.
Now a growing share of people don't visit pages at all. They ask an assistant and get a paragraph back. For facts that's great, and this site is built for it: every article also exists as plain Markdown for AI tools.
But if everything we publish fits into a paragraph without losing anything, we've made something easy to replace. A voice, a detail clearly meant for you, a small surprise: that's what a summary can't carry. So give machines clean facts, and give humans a reason to come anyway.
Why I can play again
Leading a team of more than 300 people at Storyblok, my time to try things out got less and less. Over the last year and a half that changed. With AI agents I get things done much faster, and that buys back the time to experiment. I wrote about how I work with agents and about one night that produced four field types.
On this site I spent most of my time on what you can see and play with, not on the plumbing. And building things myself again brought me closer to our customers, especially developers and technical leaders. You talk about what broke last night, not about slides.
It's in our own hands
None of this needs a big budget. It needs a decision to care about one detail more than necessary. Make it about the people you build for. Reward curiosity, never block a task. Respect people's settings. Keep it light. And ask first when it's not your site.
Building got cheaper. We can spend what we save on the parts that make people want to stay. Whether we do is up to us.
If you made it this far, check the bottom right corner of your screen. Then go and build something a little bit unnecessary.