What Hyperfocus and a Good Excuse Can Produce in an Afternoon
Audio overview of Squishmallowdex — a kid-friendly collection tracker for 3,000+ plush creatures. No ads, no tracking.
Generated for project: Squishmallowdex
A friend mentioned her ten-year-old was researching Squishmallows. A few hours later, the first release was shipped. A few more hours made it actually robust. That’s the story of Squishmallowdex — a collection tracker for over 3,000 plush creatures, built in an afternoon of hyperfocus and a good excuse.
This episode explores a project designed to be educational first: running terminal commands, showing kid-friendly logs, teaching how data gets scraped and structured. It’s also an offline-capable PWA with no ads, no tracking, and no parent-hostile dark patterns. Search, filter, favourites, collection tracking — all running locally without sending a byte of data anywhere.
The interesting tension is between building something genuinely useful for kids and building it in a way that respects them. No engagement loops designed to maximise screen time. No data collection dressed up as personalisation. Just a fast, local database of every Squishmallow that exists, built by someone who looked up from their screen, realised they were starving, and decided to keep going anyway.