about nerd shizz

what this is

nerd shizz is a small, slow-growing collection of free web games for engineers, data folks, IT, devops, SREs, and anyone tech-adjacent enough to laugh at a sql injection joke. it's playable signed-out. it has leaderboards if you want them. it has an opinion about how the internet should be.

why it exists

picture the internet around 2004. you'd get to work, or to a computer lab, or to the family desktop after someone finally got off the phone, and you'd open killsometime.com or one of its hundred cousins and just play something dumb for fifteen minutes. flash games with physics that lied to you. a stick figure doing something it shouldn't. no account. no launcher. no thirty-second ad for a mobile game that looks nothing like the ad. you clicked a link and the fun started immediately.

i learned i was a computer "nerd" the day i figured out how to change the color of my myspace banner. that's the whole origin story. somebody pasted some CSS into a box and the box turned a different color and a switch flipped in my brain that has never flipped back. (the brain in question belongs to one Bertholamew Quintavius Washington Dirty Sanchez III, but everyone just calls him b-dubz.) the web felt like a place you could reach into and bend. it felt like ours.

most of that internet is gone. the "free" games that replaced it are venture-stuffed user-acquisition funnels: cookie banners that pretend to ask, five tracking pixels in the head tag, an ad break between rounds, a popup begging for your email before you've even played. nerd shizz is a deliberate refusal of that. it loads fast because there's nothing on it that doesn't need to be there. the games work signed-out because they should. the leaderboards are optional because they should be. it's the fifteen-minute time-killer from the old web, rebuilt by someone who now knows what a content security policy is.

what's on it

the games keep showing up as there's time to build them right. spot-the-bug puzzles, an endless runner, snake reimagined as a CI/CD pipeline, a gotcha platformer where the obvious solution is always wrong, and more in the oven. each one is built carefully, not fast. check the games page for the current lineup; this paragraph would just go stale if i listed them all here.

how it's built

vanilla javascript, no framework, no build step. if a browser can't run it directly, it doesn't belong here. the whole thing is one cloudflare pages deployment: static files at the edge, pages functions for the api, a single d1 database (that's sqlite, at the edge) for anything authoritative, and r2 for object storage. there is no VPS, no redis, no separate server process, no tunnel. sessions are stateless signed cookies. sign-in is plain email and password, hashed properly, never stored in the clear.

payments, when they exist, will live on a hosted shopify subdomain, which means we never see card data. not "we encrypt it carefully." we never see it. that's the only acceptable amount of card data to have.

architecture decisions get written down, one file per call, so future me can't pretend the trade-offs were obvious. it's all considered, even when it's wrong.

what it isn't

• not an ad-supported product. we will never sell ads. that is not a roadmap item.
• not a tracker. one first-party session cookie if you sign in, plus an anonymous player ID cookie. no third-party trackers. no marketing automation.
• not a startup. no fundraising plan, no growth team, no acquisition funnel. this exists because it should exist.
• not a SaaS. it's a hobby site that happens to be built carefully.

how it survives

eventually, merch. shirts and stickers and the occasional weird object, sold through a hosted shopify subdomain, with the proceeds covering the hosting bill and not a lot more. that's the whole business model. if it doesn't work, the site stays up anyway, because the costs are small enough to absorb. that's the quiet luxury of a hobby: it doesn't have to make money to be allowed to live.

the values

• respect the audience. nerds are smart. write to them like they're smart.
• own the data. the parts that matter run on infrastructure we control. nothing goes through a third party that doesn't have to.
• tell the truth. when something breaks we say it broke. when we change something material in privacy or terms, we surface it.
• build slowly. a hobby site doesn't have to ship every week. it has to age well.

contact

bugs, feature ideas, and anything that smells like a security issue: email security@nerdshizz.com. it's one inbox, watched by one person, which is more than most billion-dollar apps can honestly claim. politics: somewhere else.