Building Tangle-me: the story so far
Tangle-me started from a simple frustration: you need one platform to sell your house, another to sell your car, a third to post your CV. Why? An ad is keywords, a location, and a way to reach you. So Tangle-me is a single global classifieds platform where text ads are free forever, everything is geolocated — drop a pin anywhere on Earth and advertise there — and users ("Tangles") connect directly.
The shape of it
It's a Progressive Web App: installable, offline-capable, no app store between me and the people using it. Usernames are three random words — your "Tangle ID" — instead of yet another handle land-grab. Free accounts get unlimited text ads; paid tiers add photos, with WebP conversion, thumbnails, a carousel, and a lightbox viewer. Six languages at launch.
What shipping actually looks like
By Build 005 the pattern was familiar to anyone who has shipped solo: fix a CSS conflict that was silently hiding keywords in the My Ads modal; discover the delete function failed on a type comparison; build a whole photo-upload pipeline in a day and then spend the next one staring at a 500 error in the messaging API that turned out to hinge on which of two nearly identically named databases the code was talking to. Progress is real but it's made of exactly this.
Performance work paid off, though: after a PWA optimization pass, the site scores 100/100 on desktop and 94/100 on mobile in Lighthouse, with zero total blocking time and zero layout shift.
Why bother
Because advertising yourself — your stuff, your skills, your services — shouldn't require an account on six platforms and a marketing budget. Advertise so you can be found. That's the whole thesis.