PostHog Shipped a Website That Looks Like 1995 and It Took 42 Hours
Their web engineer ran three 14-hour days straight and the result is a retro OS UI for a modern analytics product.
PostHog making their analytics product look like it boots from a floppy disk. The specific kind of courage involved in going the wrong direction aesthetically — that paid off. The hedgehog energy is real.
PostHog launched a new website that looks like a desktop operating system from 1995 — windows you can drag, pixel-grid aesthetics, the whole bit — and their web engineer did it in three consecutive 14-hour days, which is either heroic or a war crime, depending on your relationship with sleep deprivation.
This is, objectively, the correct thing to do.
There is a specific kind of courage involved in making your enterprise analytics product look like it boots from a floppy disk. Most companies in this space are racing each other to the same destination — the same clean white gradients, the same hero text in Inter, the same stock photo of a woman looking at a dashboard and feeling good about it. PostHog looked at all of that and decided to go the other direction so hard they came out the other side somewhere near 1997.
The 42-hour sprint is the part that sticks with me. Not because of the hours (plenty of people work stupid hours on stupid things), but because of what it implies about the person doing it — that the work was interesting enough to sustain that. You don't grind three 14-hour days on something you're phoning in.
Most web engineers spend that kind of time fighting a webpack config or untangling someone else's CSS. This one spent it building a fake OS in the browser.
Good trade.
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