Hello again — relaunching xennex.app
After a decade on a tired WordPress install, XenneX has a new home. Here's what changed and what's coming.
The old xennex.app was a WordPress site I spun up sometime around 2014 and never really touched again. It did the job — list the apps, point people at the right places — but it was starting to feel like the kind of homepage a contractor builds for a client who never logs in.
This is the new one.
What's different
It's faster. The old site needed a database round-trip to render a page that hadn't changed in years. This one is a static-rendered Next.js app deployed on Vercel — every page is plain HTML by the time it reaches your browser, and the entire site fits on a coffee napkin's worth of bytes.
It's writeable. There's a blog now, and the workflow is git push. No login screen, no plugin update reminders, no comments section asking me to moderate spam from Belarusian SEO firms. Just MDX files in a folder.
It's honest about the past. The Products page lists everything XenneX has ever shipped — the active stuff, the games still kicking around app stores, and the projects that didn't make it. Each one gets a status badge. No pretending the discontinued ones never happened.
What's coming
I'll be writing here regularly. Topics I want to dig into:
- Project post-mortems — what worked on Dealery, what I'd do differently with Game Night, why Rent Buddy never got out of beta.
- Stack notes — the trade-offs I've made over the years on Ionic, Angular, Node, AWS, GCP, and the AI/LLM tooling I'm betting on next.
- Studio operations — running a one-person software shop alongside a day job. Time, scope, and the unglamorous discipline of shipping.
If you used any of the apps over the years — thanks. The ones still running aren't going anywhere. The new ones are coming.
— Buddy