Complete / live
11 Second Club
The job was to move an old animation community site onto modern infrastructure. The server turned out to be the easy part.
- What it is
- A monthly animation competition and community.
- Starting job
- Move a neglected server onto modern infrastructure.
- What shipped
- A rebuilt web platform and a mobile app for streaming, voting, and forums.
01 / The small job
The brief was to move the server.
The 11 Second Club gives animators an audio clip, eleven seconds long, and a month to turn it into a performance.
The community kept using the site even though it had been neglected for years. The job looked like infrastructure: move it off an external server and onto something current and maintainable.
02 / Pulling the thread
The server was only the first problem.
The operating system was extremely old. Important dependencies were difficult to install. The application and several generations of forum software carried their own history. Media handling was poor, spam was persistent, and deployment was fragile.
- 01Understand the old operating system and application.
- 02Untangle the forums, data, and user history.
- 03Replace the weak media, spam, and deployment paths.
- 04Keep the community working while each layer changed.
Rebuilding became simpler than preserving each failing layer.The decision
03 / The rebuild
Preserve what serves the community.
The work expanded into modern infrastructure, application changes, data migration, a modern forum, and a better video pipeline. Uploaded media is re-encoded and delivered properly. A local Qwen classifier handles text spam, while vision-based checks catch spam carried in images.
The rebuild also made room for achievements, Easter eggs, and the details that make a long-running community feel looked after. Alongside the web platform, I built a mobile app that works like YouTube for the 11 Second Club: members can stream 16 years of animation entries, vote, and use the forums from their phones.
04 / The result
The product nobody was maintaining became mine to finish.
The rebuilt web platform and its full mobile companion are live.
What started as a server move became ownership of the whole experience. Each newly visible problem was followed to the layer that could actually fix it.