Huddleverse: project facts
- Project
- Huddleverse
- Period
- 2024
- Role
- Frontend Engineer · Huddle01 Growth
- Summary
- Gamified public testnet ecosystem
- Description
- A gamified testnet site where users can complete quests, earn rewards, and track their participation in meetings. I focused on building the quest logic, tracking user meeting times, and optimizing the pages so they loaded instantly despite having a ton of heavy artwork and animations.
- Domains
- Growth Engineering, Gamification, Performance Optimization, Ecosystem Setup
- Technologies
- Next.js, React, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, tRPC, Web3
- Ownership
- Quest logic and social media API integrations
- Ownership
- Meeting participation duration tracking backend
- Ownership
- Image and asset performance optimization pipeline
- Ownership
- Onboarding flows and gamified reward animations
- Ownership
- PostHog analytics for tracking quest completions
- Learning
- Gamification only works if the experience is instant. If a user has to wait five seconds to see a checkmark next to a quest they just finished, they lose interest.
- Professional signal
- I enjoy blending product growth ideas with deep performance optimization.
a gamified testnet site where users can complete quests, earn rewards, and track their participation in meetings. i focused on building the quest logic, tracking user meeting times, and optimizing the pages so they loaded instantly despite having a ton of heavy artwork and animations.
ecosystem quests should feel like playing a game instead of ticking checklist boxes.
i built backend tasks to verify things like Twitter follows and retweets, and set up cron jobs to check how long users actually stayed in meetings. to fix performance, I set up Cloudflare image optimization and wrote custom loaders in Next.js to handle our heavy graphics. i also added smooth CSS and Framer Motion animations to make the rewards feel satisfying to unlock.
we launched the testnet portal with over 85 quests. it became a major driver for new users, and we used the analytical data I set up to see which quests were too hard and adapt the onboarding flows accordingly.
- ·quest logic and social media API integrations
- ·meeting participation duration tracking backend
- ·image and asset performance optimization pipeline
- ·onboarding flows and gamified reward animations
- ·postHog analytics for tracking quest completions
a site with lots of animations and artwork can easily become sluggish, especially on mobile devices. i had to build a quest tracking system that connects to social APIs and meeting logs, while making sure the pages loaded quickly and animations ran smoothly without stuttering.
gamification only works if the experience is instant. if a user has to wait five seconds to see a checkmark next to a quest they just finished, they lose interest.
i thought people cared mostly about rewards. small animations and instant feedback mattered more.
- ·slow page loads with heavy art
- ·untrackable meeting times
- ·clunky onboarding flows
- ·instant loading optimized assets
- ·cron-based duration rewards
- ·smooth interactive onboarding
gamification works only when everything feels instant.
i would use WebSockets to push quest completion updates to the UI, instead of having the client manually poll our database. i would also move the Twitter API checks to a decoupled queue service to prevent social API delays from slowing down our main app server.
- ·i spent hours fine-tuning the particle animation that plays when you claim a reward just to get it running at a stable 60 FPS on cheap Android phones.
- ·we launched the site and immediately had to handle thousands of concurrent users, which caught us off guard and forced us to optimize our database queries on the fly.
i enjoy blending product growth ideas with deep performance optimization.