Be the Person Who Takes Initiative, and Your World Will Forever Change

HEGE Is a Story About All of Us

Hello Hegends,

This is Day behind the keyboard (again!)

Today I want to talk about two things.

First I want to tell you the story of how the new hegecoin.com came to be. But then, more importantly I also want to tell you the story of how HEGE works, and how your help is absolutely crucial for HEGE to survive and thrive.

As you might know, in late February I replaced the old hegecoin.com with a completely remastered version. If you didn’t notice the update, there’s nothing wrong with your eyes. Because on the surface almost nothing changed. Under the hood though, literally everything was replaced.

In short, the remaster did two things:

1. It cut hosting costs from $275 PER MONTH down to ZERO.
2. Speed went through the roof, turning hegecoin.com into the fastest memecoin website on the planet.

Pretty damn impressive, if I may say so myself.

In the rest of this article, I’ll tell you why I took on this task, and share some reflections around it. It’ll be the story about me and my work, but in the bigger picture, this is also not a story about just me.

Really, it’s the story about HEGE, and how it’s not just some “team” in the abstract sense, but a diverse group of individuals. That’s how it’s always been, and that’s how it always will be.

At the end of the day, what makes HEGE happen is the individual effort of many many different people. Different people with different skills, different ambitions, and different opinions. But all these different people have one thing in common: they saw some way they could contribute, and then they didn’t sit around waiting for permission to do it, or for somebody else to do it. They just went ahead and goddamn did it.

(If this is you, you know it, and massive respect to you.)

So the bigger point I want to make here in this article is this: don’t think of HEGE as some anonymous “team”, and don’t sit around waiting for “them” to do something.

YOU are HEGE, if you decide to be.

Good Design, Horrible Code

But let’s rewind the story to the beginning, and let me walk you through how the new hegecoin.com came to be.

It was sometime in October last year when I realized that we needed to completely overhaul the HEGE website. At that point, I had been maintaining it for 6 months or so, since sometime early in the summer. I had also added a few new things to it, like the blog section.

But unfortunately, I had nothing to do with the original design nor the original programming of the site – when I came in, everything was already in place.

The reason I say unfortunately is because while the design was fantastic, the actual construction of the site was not. In fact, it was the exact opposite. Honestly, it was a mess. And not only was it a mess, it was also locked to an expensive and inflexible platform called Webflow.

At the time, working with what I had, I did manage to get the blog up and running, and I built the League of Hegends section, too. But I was fighting the system every step of the way. And I wasn’t happy with the end result either.

But that actually wasn’t the biggest problem. The biggest problem was that for hosting this mess, we were paying $275 per month. Yes. PER MONTH. It was crazy expensive for what we got, and with the memecoin market being what it is, there was no way we could justify eating this cost for much longer.

It was either we found a cheaper way, or we would have to shut down the site.

Grumpy Old Webhead

So this was the situation back in October last year. And why I somewhat reluctantly decided I had to do something about it.

Now, just to be clear, I don’t get paid for my work with HEGE — I’m volunteering my time and energy, just like everybody else on the project. So I did hesitate a bit to take this task on, because it would be quite a bit of work.

But in the end I knew nobody else was going to do it. And I knew I would probably enjoy the challenge, too.

You see, forever ago, in what seems like an almost past life, I was a professional web developer.

In fact, I’m one of those grumpy old-school webheads. I built my first website back in the late 90’s. That was a few years before the dotcom boom, when web development was still a tiny tiny niche. I don’t even think it was called “web development” back then. It was just a bunch of randos building janky websites. There were no university courses. Hardly any books to learn from. You kinda just had to figure it out on your own.

In these early days, everything was horribly primitive. Even the simplest thing like a three column layout or a box shadow took sooo much work to get right. And then on top of that, you had to make it work in Internet Explorer 6 — the arch-nemesis of every old-school webdev. Seriously. IE6 has got to be the most intensely hated piece of software in the entire history of computers.

Anyway what I’m saying is that back then, everything about the tech just kinda… sucked. But at the same time, it was also amazing and magical. And it had me completely hooked. In fact, in many ways, it reminds me of how crypto is today.

Fast forward, from the late 90’s I then spent the better part of 15 years in the web trenches. All through the web2 revolution, right up until 2013, when I had to quit. Mostly because of health stuff, but also because I just didn’t find it as fun anymore.

Getting Back in the Game

Okay. But why am I telling you all this?

I’m telling you this so that you understand where I’m coming from: when I decided to rebuild hegecoin.com last October, I stepped back into a field I hadn’t set foot in for over 10 years.

I was rusty.

Really rusty.

But I decided to just go for it. (How hard could it be, right?)

After some initial research I decided to build the new site using a program called Hugo, a so called static site generator. This is a fancy word for a simple website that doesn’t need a database to store the pages, and because of this can be hosted anywhere for cheap or even for free.

I knew that this would solve our two big problems:

1. It would cut hosting fees down to zero, to save us $275 per month and keep the website alive.
2. It would get rid of the platform lock-in, creating a site that we could easily move to new hosting if we had to.

I also wanted to make the whole thing open source, in line with the OG crypto ethos.

The Need for Speed

As I set out building the new site, I didn’t start with the aim of optimizing it every way I could think of, to make it so ridiculously fast as it ended up becoming.

That obsession came later.

I did consider speed right from the start, because that was another big problem with the old site: it was slooow. Especially on mobile connections.

Like, atrociously sluggish.

Taking over 15 seconds to load in some cases.

So that was definitely something I wanted to improve on. But I never expected to find myself going down the rabbit hole of micro-optimizing every part of the new site to squeeze out the last little drop of performance.

That obsession came later, when I realized it was actually possible to ace the PageSpeed score.

At first, I didn’t think it was. But as I got the basics in place, and saw how the page scored up in the 90’s already, that little “what if I can actually get it up to 100”-seed was firmly planted in my mind and would not let go.

So down the rabbit hole I went.

And through a lot of research and trial-and-error, that “what if” slowly turned into reality: yes, it was really possible to score that perfect 100.

(If you’re not a total web nerd like me and didn’t know, PageSpeed is a tool that scores the speed of your website on a scale between 0 and 100, with a perfect 100 being difficult to achieve.)

All in all, going down this rabbit hole probably added about two months to the timeline — originally I had planned to have the new site done by the end of the year, but in the end it wasn’t ready until early March.

So it did turn into a lot more work than I had expected. But it was totally worth it. Even though most people won’t notice, just the feeling of knowing this means a lot to me:

Hegecoin.com is now literally the fastest memecoin website on the planet.

Tell the World

So I went down this speedmaxxing rabbit hole, right. And I finally came out the other end. The new hegecoin.com was up and running. Everything was working as expected, and blazingly fast at that.

End of story?

No.

Because of course another idea popped into my mind: “Why don’t I write an article about it?”

So I had just spent weeks digging deep, right, doing something that I thought was actually pretty cool, and something that I thought could also be valuable to others. So I didn’t just want to leave it at that, for nobody else to see, moving on to the next thing.

It’s like nailing that trick on the skateboard, you know. If nobody’s there to see it, it just doesn’t feel the same. Not so much because you want people to be impressed. There’s that too of course, but it’s more this feeling that you did something awesome, and if you don’t share it with somebody, it’s almost like it didn’t really happen at all.

So I decided to write a short article, and line out everything I did to ace that perfect 100 score.

It’ll be a short piece, I thought, take me a couple of days to put together.

Not so much.

Because what was planned as one short article I would write in a few days, then ballooned into a series of 7 articles spanning two months.

So this too turned into a lot more work than I had planned (I see a pattern here!)

But all said and done, the whole series also turned out much better than I expected it to. So in the end, I think it was worth the effort.

If you’re interested, go check out the full series here: How To Build A Ridiculously Fast Website

We’ll see if these articles can get some attention from outside of crypto, which was my original hope. There’s a lot of good stuff in there that’ll be interesting to anybody building websites. Sadly, a lot of people will be turned off by just the whiff of crypto and memecoins, so it’ll be an uphill battle.

But the only way to eventually change people’s perception and biases is to put out solid work that stands impressive on its own. So that’s what I’ll keep doing.

Focus on the Fundamentals and You Will Go Far (Takeaway 1)

So that was the story of how hegecoin.com came to be the fastest memecoin website on the planet.

As we’re coming to the end of this article, I have two takeaways for you.

The first is this:

If you focus on the fundamentals and if you learn them well, that knowledge will last you a surprisingly long time. Even in a fast-paced world like technology.

When I started this project, I had not set foot in web development for over 10 years. That’s a looong time in tech. Long enough to make a lot of knowledge completely outdated.

At the start, I wasn’t sure how well I would do, given how many things had changed since I left. But as it turns out, at the foundational level surprisingly little had actually changed.

Overall, everything is just a lot better now. The browsers generally support standards much better. The cool things that were just coming on to the scene as I left, they’re now mature and can actually be used. Things that used to take hours of frustration to get right can now be done in minutes.

I had to learn a bunch of new things, of course. But it was mostly building on top of what I already knew, making the new things easy to grasp. For sure, most of the old frameworks of the day were dead and gone, but the foundations underneath were largely the same.

And actually, as it turns out, the only reason I could make hegecoin.com the fastest memecoin website on the planet was precisely because I knew these foundations. Not because I knew the latest fancy framwork. That would just have added a bunch of overhead, slowing things down.

Taking a step back to reflect over this, I think the number one reason I could adapt so easily was this:

I knew the fundamentals.

In this case the fundamentals meant a solid understanding of pure HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. That’s what I always focused on back in the days. Never the frameworks built on top. Had I not done this — if I had only learnt whatever framework or library that was the hot new thing of the day — then I would have been completely lost now.

For me, starting out in web development over 25 years ago, this fundamentals-first mindset was not so much a conscious choice as it was simply the only option — there were no frameworks back then. You simply had to learn pure HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. That was it.

But if you’re starting out today, in a world overflowing with choices, my suggestion to you would be: focus on the fundamentals first.

That’s how your knowledge will last. And that’s how you can build the cool shit that most others can’t.

HEGE Needs You (Takeaway 2)

With that said, the second takeaway I have is circling back to what I talked about right at the start of the article:

Don’t ask what HEGE can do for you; ask what YOU can do for HEGE.

If you want to contribute. If you see something that needs to be fixed. If you see something we’re doing wrong. If you have an awesome idea. Whatever you want to do.

Just do it.

Be the person who takes initiative, and your world will forever change.

Read that again.

Thanks For Reading

And that’s the perfect way to round off for today.

If you’ve been reading all the way down here, thank you for reading!

Until next time, have a great week, and make sure to check us out over on X, or jump into our Hegequarters Telegram and say hi.

Much love,
— Day 👊

PS. If you want to get in touch with me, check out my website.

PPS. Check out the piece “TWO-HEGE” below. This LEGENDARY collectible is up for sale on HEGE DRiP!