Don’t You Dare Say Pumpkin Spice
Issue #55: An overdue side quest update and a plot twist I didn’t plan for.
September 9, 2025: As I write this, it’s 7:30am, I’m enjoying a cup of coffee and a quiet morning on my balcony — and I am absolutely sweating my ass off. Go ahead and show me all of the cute back-to-school photos of your kids that you want, but I am unconvinced and unwilling to accept that summer is over.
I just got back to Valencia after spending the past two months in Southeast Asia, which has only made my internal calendar even more useless. My circadian rhythm — or whatever the equivalent is for seasonal awareness — is officially fried. One thing I am aware of though, is that it’s been way too long since my last update, and while it might seem like Side Quest Summer has fallen by the wayside, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Last we chatted, it was the end of July and I had my metaphorical backpack packed, ready to head off to Font Camp. Well, the bus to camp took a sudden detour, because the very next day, I woke up to record breaking single-day sales and a 20x spike in traffic to Tidy Plans, one of my other side projects. Font Camp was immediately put on hold while I scrambled to figure out what the hell was going on, and celebrated my sudden windfall of like, $60.
Back in the spring, I had done a ton of SEO work on Tidy Plans — like, hours and hours and HOURS of blindly tinkering with keywords and building landing pages and trying to figure out how Google’s black box algorithm works. And after a few months of letting that SEO juice marinate, it finally began to pay off.
Buuut there was one tiny problem: Having just launched Totebrag (my newest ecom shop full of Shopify’s latest and greatest 2025 bells and whistles), it was painfully obvious how archaic my older sites were. Turns out, my existing shops were still running on a codebase from 2015 (!!!) which, in internet years, is like carving HTML into a stone tablet — and it was unknowingly limiting the upside of my newfound SEO glory.
Enter my next side quest (just not the one I had planned):
Quest #3: A Spontaneous Vibe Coding Bootcamp 🤖
Given that August is low season for calendar sales and that I had plenty of time on my hands in Bali, it felt like the perfect opportunity to give Tidy Plans a quick facelift. But once I began pulling out some of the old code, the whole site unsurprisingly collapsed like a house of cards. Before I knew it, I had stripped it down to an ugly Craigslist-esque shell of its former self, and began rebuilding the site almost entirely from scratch.
After a month of 14-hours days spent at ZIN Café1, the site was back online — faster, cuter, and no longer held together by the duct tape that was my decade-old code.
The wild part is that before any of this, I literally didn’t know how to code. Like, I could fumble my way through basic HTML and had some familiarity with CSS, but that was about it.
I learned simply by feeding chunks of code into ChatGPT and asking for fixes — it’s what the kids call ✨vibe coding✨ these days, but with one important distinction: Rather than just blindly copying and pasting the repaired code that ChatGPT spat back out, I went through line by line — more than 4,000 lines of code 😵💫 — asking it to explain what each element does, and trial-and-errored things until I understood.
It was messy and super tedious at first, but about three weeks later, I was no longer relying on my robot professor and was able to write full, functional sections of code myself. Oh, and it’s already working — even with the site being fully inoperable for ~10 days,2 August was my second highest month of revenue of the year (after January, obvi), which I’ll happily attribute to both the increasing SEO momentum and the site’s shiny new paint job.
As for Font Camp, even though it got hijacked by this rogue crash course in front-end development, I’m still planning to attend (aiming for later this month, for real this time). The cool thing is that I now have the perfect use case for it, as the newly designed Tidy Plans website is in need of a pretty, custom script accent font to replace the cookie-cutter placeholder I currently have in there.
And as for Side Quest Summer overall, my list of project ideas is now twice as long as when I started, and I’m having so much fun tinkering and learning that I’ve decided to continue this indefinitely, well beyond the summer.
The beauty (and benefit) of side quests is that simply working on one idea tends to surface the next. So what began as a fixed experiment — seven projects in fourteen weeks — is evolving into something slightly more flexible. That original self-imposed deadline served its purpose of getting me moving, but now, my goal is to follow the momentum rather than force things to fit an arbitrary timeline.
What’s Next:
Last week, I started what is likely to become Quest #4: Migrating my personal portfolio website off of Weebly (where it is currently hosted, and which has an equally archaic code base) to… somewhere else, tbd.
I’m doing so with the help of CodeFast, an online course created by Indie Hacker legend Marc Louvion. I figured now was a good time to get a bit of slightly more formal coding education under my belt, and so far, it’s as equally entertaining as it is helpful.
Spending the past two months mostly solo threw me into hardcore introvert mode — between living at the cowork and training for the Valencia Half Marathon (yes, another side quest), it was the most productive stint I’ve had in years, and I am going to try my damndest to not lose that momentum. But now that I’m back in Spain, I also want to make up for my lost summer. So while I do love a cozy flannel shirt and a pumpkin-spiced anything as much as the next basic bitch, I’m going to squeeze in a few more beach days with a tinto de verano in hand first.
I’ll also be back soon with a (highly-requested) full recap of my Bali trip, assuming I don’t take another unplanned month-long detour 😉
Thanks for reading!
-Em
🌟 Side Quest Directory
A constantly evolving directory of all of the micro-businesses and indie projects I’m working on.
Haters will say the illustration at the top of this post is unrealistic, so here’s a photo of what my actual work setup was like: An open-air coworking space 30 seconds from the beach, bottomless $2 unicorn lattes and a fresh fruit bowl every morning. Okay, maybe I didn’t hate everything about Bali.
Yes, I was working 100% on the live production site, no sandbox. Pure Jesus-take-the-wheel style vibe coding in its most authentic form. For sure lost out on several days of revenue, but it was great motivation to finish the job quickly ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
“Carving HTML into a stone tablet” 😂. Love your writing; quite impressed with your self-taught coding skills.
I want some of this joyous energy!