(rip) pineapple.lol

For some reason, I correlate the idea of ‘random’ with ‘pineapple’. As in if someone were to ask me for a random word, I’d probably say pineapple.

While stuck in covid lockdown, I was thinking of putting all the side projects I was building under some umbrella brand, rather than having them be random repositories on my GitHub. Something like Dawn Labs which just built and shared a bunch of cool open-source projects. So when I was thinking of what to name it, the first word that came into my head was ‘pineapple’. And I’d just bought my neeraj.lol domain and loved the TLD, and so pineapple.lol was born.

I spent some time coming up with our pineapple mascot. I wanted everything to feel lighthearted and fun, just to show we didn’t take ourselves too seriously. One of the first drawings of our mascot had him holding a scepter. Over time, I decided to give him sunglasses instead, and used my limited design skills to make him in Sketch. Once he was done, a friend of mine declared that his name was Fronz.

At the time, we were building a lot of web apps that needed deployment. We used Vercel, but kept hitting the limits on their free tier. So after we set up our site, I decided to reach out to them to see if they would sponsor us. They did, so long as we put their logos on all of our sites.

I’d like to think we made a few cool projects. At the very least, it was a lot of fun to just build stuff for the sake of it. One of the first projects was aha. I’d thought of the idea back in my high school hackathon days back in 2017, when I couldn’t decide what to name my projects. I rewrote it and made it open source under pineapple.lol.

One of my other favorite projects was emojify-pr-title, which was a GitHub action to automatically prefix all PR titles with emojis (either random or to categorize). I built it in a time when I was obsessed with emojis.

Since I’ve graduated and started work I’ve had less and less time to work on these fun side projects, so pineapple.lol has just been sitting. I remember getting the email about the domain renewal, and thought that I’d revisit it in a bit. But when I finally did, the renewal period had passed. Now, its $2.5k to get it back.

Rip pineapple.lol. I’ll probably just move everything to pineapple.neeraj.lol at some point to keep the projects alive. But this is also a reminder to myself to keep building things for fun.