Hi HN,

I’m a frontend engineer based in Korea, and like many of you, I’ve always dreamed of building and running my own micro-business. Today, I’m excited to share a project I built to capture the humor and struggles of our industry: Grow Developer (https://devgrow.co.kr).

### The Backstory The idea came to me during the 2025 year-end holidays. I’ve always enjoyed mobile clicker/idle games and wondered how that "growth" mechanic would feel if applied to a software engineer's career. I wanted to create something lighthearted that colleagues could keep open in a browser tab to smile at while they work.

### How it Works You start as a junior developer manually clicking the monitor to generate "code". As you progress, you automate your workflow, scale your services, and eventually aim for an 'Exit' to earn stock options. These options provide permanent buffs for your next "playthrough," allowing for a prestige-style progression. The game is packed with memes and situations that anyone who has dealt with production deployments will recognize.

Cross-device sync: If you log in with GitHub, your progress follows you between mobile and desktop.

### Technical Stack & Lessons Learned I built this in about a week using a modern web stack:

- Framework: Next.js (deployed on Vercel) - Database & Auth: Supabase - ORM: Prisma - UI: shadcn/ui - IDE/Design: Antigravity

The most interesting part of this journey wasn't the build, but the launch. Shortly after sharing it in Korea, the site hit 2,000 concurrent users in a single day. I quickly blew through the limits of the Vercel Hobby plan and had to upgrade to Pro on the spot to keep the service alive.

I also ran into a major bottleneck with Supabase and Prisma. I realized too late that I had left a database update query inside a loop, causing a massive spike in Supabase resource usage. It was a classic "N+1" style mistake that became painfully visible under load. I had to rush an optimization patch to stabilize the service, which was a stressful but incredibly valuable lesson in infrastructure scaling.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the game balance or any technical questions you might have about the setup.

Thanks for checking it out!

https://devgrow.co.kr

Show HN: Grow Developer – An idle web game about the journey to a startup 'Exit'