Professions.gg

I wanted the actual odds

In Classic WoW, recipes turn from orange to yellow to green and finally grey as the chance they'll raise your profession skill falls. The game gives you colours, but not the odds. Materials cost gold and auction house prices move. I wanted to see which recipe was worth making.

I combined recipe data from Wowhead with live auction house prices to show the skill-up chance and likely cost.

I was playing Classic WoW myself, and the Burning Crusade release gave me a clear deadline. I wanted the tool live while people were actually levelling their professions.

The data was the work

I needed thousands of recipes in a usable shape. My Puppeteer scraper kept tripping over cookie popups, slow pages and race conditions. I moved the collection to Apify for its request queue and retries, then stored the results in PostgreSQL.

I kept the backend small with Prisma. Next.js server rendering gave the recipe pages a shot at search traffic.

StackNext.js (Pages Router), TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Tailwind, Prisma, Vercel, Apify

Then people turned up

I posted it to Reddit and about 20,000 people used it on the first day. My database and server were in different regions (oops), so I scrambled to get Vercel's edge caching working. About half the visitors were on phones, and the mobile layout needed work too. Fun times.