A developer resource site I built in 2020 that still gets 1,000 clicks a day

I was researching dev tools and libraries in 2020 and kept landing on the same terrible websites — the resources existed, scattered across CodePen and GitHub and random blogs, but the sites curating them were ugly, slow, and hard to navigate. I figured I could build something better and outrank them in search. So that's what I did.

devsnap.me is a curated collection of free HTML, CSS, and JavaScript resources — code examples, UI components, templates, tools — organized into browsable categories. I built scrapers with Puppeteer that pulled metadata and screenshots from CodePen, GitHub, and other sources, rotating through proxies to avoid rate limits. Everything got stored in Firebase, and a Nuxt.js frontend statically generated the whole site for fast loading and strong SEO. Over 2,300 items across the library when I shipped it.

The site was part of a broader strategy I was running that year — build SEO-optimized developer sites, capture organic traffic, use that audience as a distribution channel for my own products. DevSnap ended up being the most successful of these in raw traffic volume. Over a million developers have come through it, it generates steady ad revenue every year, and the real value is the same play as css.glass — a daily stream of developers I can put my own tools in front of.

I haven't touched this project in years. It just runs. A thousand clicks a day from Google, every day, from something I built once and moved on from. Not everything needs to be a moonshot — sometimes the best projects are the ones you ship and let compound quietly in the background.