Why I'm Writing This, and Who It's For

I'm a designer. Seven years of it — Seoul, New York, color theory, typography, Design systems and what is a "good design" for the works. But coding? That's a different planet. I don't understand pointers. I can't explain async/await. And don't ask me why npm install breaks sometimes, because I genuinely have no idea. I just... guess.

Yet I built Glowtris. A full browser Tetris game. Basically from scratch. By talking to Claude. oh and this beautiful blog and blog's editor too.

I can't code. Never have. And here's the thing—that turned out to be exactly what I needed.

What happened in a month

I asked Claude: "Can we build a Tetris game in the browser?"

He said yes. So we did it. A week for the engine. Another week fixing everything that broke. Another for design, branding, DevOps hell. A month later, the game shipped.

My part was stupid simple: look at what Claude made. Say if it's right or broken. Describe what to change. That was literally it.

He was the hands. I was the eyes. And somehow, it worked.

This blog is a record

Not a tutorial. Not best practices. Just: "I tried this, it exploded, here's what I learned." And I want to share my own experiences to help people just like me.

The real problems I hit. Design decisions that actually stuck. Engineering disasters and how we survived them. Why PixiJS on Safari is a special circle of hell. Why Redis buckets ended up elegant. Why Vercel's read-only filesystem was a pain that saved us.

And mostly—how I didn't know what I was doing. Still don't. But built it anyway.

Who this is for

Designers who want to code

You're stuck. You've been stuck for years. Somehow you convinced yourself that coding is for people who understand recursion or binary trees or whatever. It's not. I don't understand recursion. Claude explained it to me once. I'm fine. You don't need to understand everything—you just need to describe what you want.

People making something that keeps breaking

There's no magic here. No secret sauce. Just concrete problems with concrete solutions. Problems you've probably hit too. Maybe our approach helps. Maybe it just makes you feel less insane for hitting the same wall.

People who think they're the only ones

I built this in a military barracks. At night, in my bunk, PC on desk(and that's too slow to make a game). No one around me had any idea what I was doing. No one asked about progress. But I kept building anyway. Maybe you're somewhere like that. This is for you.

Why I'm writing this

Building something is hard. Building it without knowing what you're doing is harder. Building it alone is the hardest.

But it's not impossible.

Everything here is something I actually built, actually fought with, actually got working. I'm being careful with these words because maybe—just maybe—you'll read it and go "oh shit, that was me too." And then you'll keep going.

Because you're not the only one.