At 16, Amir Bettir built Wildform, an installable wildlife-archive web app featuring 69 species. In a retrospective published on DEV Community on October 3, 2026, Bettir describes what worked, what broke, and the lessons they took from the project. The three moments they wanted to quit are not described individually; the useful details are in the debugging mistakes and decisions they would change.
What Wildform was—and what it was meant to feel like
Bettir describes Wildform as a Progressive Web App: a wildlife archive designed to work offline and be installed on a phone. The aim was less conventional catalog than atmosphere. “I wanted to build something that felt like a museum at night,” Bettir writes, describing a dark, cinematic experience where animals emerge as visitors scroll.
According to Bettir, the site was a static project with no backend or database. The stated stack was React 19 and Vite, Tailwind CSS 4, Vercel, and vite-plugin-pwa. These are the author’s descriptions; the post does not provide an independent audit or a comparison with alternative stacks.
Five parts of the experience
- Leopard hero: a full-screen opening scene with a parallax effect.
- Field Film: an animation driven by scrolling.
- Living Archive: 69 species, filterable by Land, Ocean, Air, and Wetlands. Bettir says profiles include diet, lifespan, size, conservation status, and a brief behavior observation.
- Quiz: a scored quiz with randomized questions.
- Field Notes: a magazine-style article displayed in a modal.
The reported count of 69 describes the site’s content, not a scientific or independently verified wildlife statistic. Bettir says the animations, the scroll-revealed species cards, the theme toggle, and the installable offline experience were among the parts they were proudest of.
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Three problems that taught practical lessons
1. Images failed because the extensions did not match
Bettir spent four hours tracing broken images to a straightforward mismatch: the files were saved as .webp but referenced as .jpg. Renaming the files to .jpg resolved the problem in Bettir’s account. The broader debugging habit is to compare the file’s real name and extension with the path in the code; some operating systems hide extensions, making a mismatch easy to miss.
2. A deployment error pointed to the wrong commit
Vercel displayed tsconfig.json:2:0: ERROR: Unexpected end of file in JSON. Bettir says the file looked valid locally, and the actual issue was that the deployment was building an old commit: the fix existed on another branch and had not been merged into main.
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When a deployment error does not match the version you are looking at locally, check the branch and commit being built before repeatedly editing the reported file. Bettir’s own shorthand was: “When Vercel fails, always check which commit it’s building.” That is a useful check for this reported situation, not a guarantee that every deployment error has the same cause.
3. Dark mode made the next design step less obvious
Wildform was already dark, so Bettir initially spent an evening writing overrides under the mistaken assumption that dark mode was the new feature. The missing mode was light mode. The lesson is to identify the existing state before building a toggle or its styles—not that every site should default to either dark or light.
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What Bettir would change next time
- Keep species data out of the main component. Bettir says all 69 species were hardcoded in
App.tsxand would put the data in JSON instead. Separating content from presentation would make a large archive easier to maintain without mixing every entry into the interface code. - Set up the PWA earlier. Bettir added PWA support later and would start with it. When installability and offline behavior are part of the intended experience, building around those requirements from the start can avoid treating them as a late add-on.
- Test on an actual phone sooner. Bettir says a desktop-first workflow let tiny text and cramped mobile layouts go unnoticed until late, when they took hours to fix. A real-device check can expose how a web app behaves on a phone beyond what is apparent in a desktop browser.
The harder part was continuing
Bettir says there were three moments when they wanted to delete the repository and start something else, but the post does not explain what happened in those moments. The honest takeaway is not that persistence makes every project succeed; it is that this project was finished despite setbacks, and the author is glad they did not quit. As Bettir puts it, “I’m most proud that I didn’t quit.”
The post invites feedback especially on performance, mobile UX, and code structure, but it reports no performance measurements. It is a personal account of one project, not evidence that this stack outperforms another or that its implementation has been independently tested.
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