6 hours of work, 250K+ developers later

Glassmorphism was everywhere in 2020 — that frosted glass look with transparency and blur that suddenly took over UI design. I was using someone else's CSS generator for it, but the UX bothered me. So I sat down and built css.glass from scratch in Vue.js. The whole thing took about six hours.

Four sliders — transparency, blur, color, outline. A draggable preview panel floating over a gradient background so you can see how the glass effect looks in context. Tweak the settings, watch the preview update in real time, and when you're happy, copy clean production-ready CSS straight to your clipboard. That's the whole tool.

This was 2020, which means no AI coding agents, no Cursor, no Claude writing code for you. Every line of Vue.js I wrote by hand — the color picker, the slider bindings, the real-time CSS generation through computed properties, the drag handling on the preview panel. Today you could describe this tool to an AI and have a working prototype in ten minutes. Back then it was a genuine exercise in building something from the ground up.

I put it online and mostly forgot about it.

Then it started ranking. When people search for "glassmorphism generator" or "glassmorphism CSS," css.glass shows up near the top. It found its audience entirely through SEO — no launch campaign, no Product Hunt, no Twitter thread. Just a tool that solved a specific problem, indexed well, and kept showing up for the people who needed it.

Over 250,000 developers have used it since. It still gets thousands of visitors and shows no signs of slowing down. A six-hour weekend project, quietly compounding for years.

At some point I realized it was more than a fun side project — it was a distribution channel. All those developers landing on css.glass were exactly the audience I wanted to reach for other things I was building. So I started placing tasteful promotions on the site: a VS Code course, a theme editor, an AI design tool. Nothing aggressive — small, well-designed banners that felt native to the page. It worked. css.glass became one of the most effective lead generation channels across everything I've built, which is a funny thing to say about something I made in an afternoon because someone else's UI annoyed me.

I think about this project when I'm tempted to overthink things. I've spent months on products that never found an audience. I've agonized over features nobody asked for. And then there's css.glass — built in a day, reaching hundreds of thousands of people. The best tools aren't always the most sophisticated ones. Sometimes they're the ones that do one thing well and show up at the right moment.

The site is still live at css.glass, still open source on GitHub (with over 400 stars), and still doing its thing. I haven't touched the code in years. It doesn't need me to.