I built a free MVP called Level Up: a 28-chapter self-development book built from a 20-hour video transcript, running entirely in your browser.The Motivation
It started with a simple question: What if you could turn a 20-hour self-dev video into something you could actually read, search, and verify? Most online self-development content exists to sell courses, not to present evidence. I wanted something honest. So, I built a real book where every notable claim is graded against cited research.What It Is: Zero Tracking, 100% Local
The result is roughly 32k words across four pillars, a 30-claim evidence audit (graded A–D/U), 13 testable protocols, and full-text search.The best part? Zero tracking. No accounts, no APIs, no cookies. Your reading progress, streaks, highlights, themes, and quiz scores live entirely in your browser’s localStorage. Nothing leaves your machine.How We Built It
The original video transcript was ~20k lines. We tag-teamed Claude, Gemini, and Opencode to compress it. From there, we built the site in layers:The Content Pipeline: scripts/build-data.mjs compiles Markdown chapters into SQLite using node:sqlite, then emits JSON data and a 30KB MiniSearch index.The Frontend: Next.js 16 static export and Tailwind v4. We used useSyncExternalStore for reactive local state via pure TypeScript modules.The Deploy: Automated via GitHub Actions straight to GitHub Pages.Into the Trenches (Challenges & Learnings)The CI Spiral: We added a React 19 QuoteCard. It built flawlessly locally (22/22 tests green), but failed eight consecutive GitHub Actions runs with a phantom TS error. It wasn’t a code bug; it was an environment disagreement. Lesson: Sometimes a feature just isn’t ready. We deleted it rather than fighting the environment or shipping it broken.Turbopack’s Quiet Types: The dev server uses Turbopack, which skips full type-checking for speed. We shipped a PR that built locally but failed in CI. Lesson: Always run tsc locally, or CI will aggressively remind you of the difference between “builds” and “types.“Case Sensitivity: GitHub Pages serves paths case-sensitively. NEXT_PUBLIC_BASE_PATH=/LevelUp is fundamentally different from /levelup. We learned this the hard way.What I’m Proud OfHonest Grading: No invented citations. If a famous “5x flow” stat is folklore, the site tells you so.Backend-less Magic: Search, quizzes, highlights, streaks, and schema-validated JSON backup/restore—all completely offline-capable.The Architecture: The data layer isn’t just a pile of JSON; it’s a statically served, compiled artifact from Markdown.Try it out:Live site: https://hustlenix.github.io/LevelUp/Source code: https://github.com/Hustlenix/LevelUpTech Stack: Next.js 16, Tailwind v4, node:sqlite, MiniSearch, GitHub Pages