endless.beer: The Most Important Project I Ever Built

In 2020, I built endless.beer — a webpage that shows a beer being poured in ASCII art, endlessly, forever. There is no other functionality. It does not stop. It will never stop. This is, by any reasonable measure, my most important project.

The technical implementation is about twenty lines of JavaScript. A setInterval cycles through ASCII art frames depicting a glass being filled, animating in a terminal-style font. The domain name cost more to register than the code took to write. The hosting is a static file on a CDN. Total ongoing maintenance: zero. The site has been up since 2020 without a single code change and I fully expect it to outlive several of my more “serious” projects.

What endless.beer represents is the philosophy of the side project freed from the obligation of usefulness. Most personal projects carry an implicit pressure to be portfolio pieces, to demonstrate skills, to solve real problems. That pressure is real and mostly healthy, but occasionally it’s worth building something for pure delight — something that makes you and a few hundred strangers smile when they stumble across it. The .beer TLD alone has justified its existence multiple times over in laughs.

There is also something philosophically correct about a beer that never runs out. I choose to interpret this as optimistic. If you’re reading this during a long debugging session, endless.beer is there for you.