What I learned building Uplifts.today

During 2025, I launched Uplifts.today, a simple site that delivers a daily uplift — short, anonymous positive experiences designed to brighten your day. While the project didn’t gain broad traction, the experience taught me a lot about experimentation, tooling, and building with intention.

I chose Replit as the platform because it allowed me to iterate fast, integrate prompt-driven code generation, and explore how modern web tooling can reduce friction in prototype-level projects. Over the course of building and refining the site, I learned not only about the technical aspects of the platform, but also about audience engagement — what works and what doesn’t when you’re publishing something meant to connect emotionally with strangers.

One clear lesson: launching is different from gaining traction. While the site didn’t take off in terms of visitors or social engagement, it did give me practical experience with:

• rapid prototyping using modern cloud-based IDEs

• integrating prompt-based generation tools into web projects

• iterating on both code and content based on real feedback

I’m glad I built it — not because it was a success in the traditional sense, but because it pushed me to learn something new and think about product feedback loops in a fresh way. It reminded me that experimentation is a tool, not just an idea — and that failures or modest results often teach us more than our biggest wins.

It was pretty great to learn how replits platform gave in built administration capabilities to connect to a domain, also host and deploy quickly with rapid iteration. It also gave me cool analytics on usage.

I’ll be writing more about what I learned from other projects and experiments — especially ones that touch on systems, teams, and delivery at scale. Stay tuned.