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Sal, audio engineer.
Raed, web developer.
They are both big fans of the Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul TV series.
Sal is well into his career as an audio engineer in NYC.
He wanted a portfolio site, but he wanted to be inspired by the Better Call Saul TV show.
bettercallsal.biz was born!
raed: it was a fun pet project, single static hard coded page, with vanilla js and plenty of css. most of the site was built in 2 days, freestyling the CSS https://github.com/raedatoui/bettercallsal.biz
During the 4 previous years, they made minimal updates: just added some content reflecting new projects Sal had worked on.
When the pandemic hit, remote and online fitness exploded.
Sal and Raed used to practice yoga together pretty regularly before the pandemic.
They did their exercising from home or in parks, and relied on instagram live feeds to follow workouts
Sal was transformed. He wanted to become a fitness influencer.
bettercallsal.fit was born!
raed: I kept the same codebase, but I just added json to render content and the navigation instead of hard coding them.
I did other improvements and updates to the site after 4 years of not making any changes to it.
The 2 builds, .biz and .fit were separate and i was already thinking of unifying them.
https://github.com/raedatoui/bettercallsal.biz/pull/3
During the pandemic, they used to get on zoom calls with various groups of friends, hang out, joke around, have a good time.
One of those group comprised of friends who were also colleagues of Sal, creative types.
Alex started making live collages of people and their backgrounds.
Many jokes were made about better call sal, what it can be, other parodies were thought about, notes were scribbled down, but no real effort was made to execute on anything yet.
One day, Sal was dealing with a pesky client, Sal, Alex and Joseph were on a zoom call, discussing their work, how to deal with demanding clients
They wanted to build a customer service page. The customer service page is a forever under construction page.
They dialed Raed in late and whipped together the page in 2 hours.
bettercallsal.construction was born
raed: that page was hobbled together using the .fit setup but the .biz rendering. It was the typical situation of 3 use cases gotta push you into a framework and I started thinking of rebuilding and re platforming all 3 sites
Having established 3 flavors of the better call sal site, the momentum to create other pages and parodies was high.
It was parody of other things, parody of the site itself, parody of parodies ....
- ted scanned sal's head and joseph created a 3d model of sal's head
- alex hacked classic paintings and photoshopped sal's face on them. he now had a collection of pandemic zoom collages and artwork parodies bettercallsal.art was born!
- joseph hacked 3 unity games and created a sal version of mario, pacman and solitaire: bettercallsal.games was born!
- joseph materialized the .art images into a 3d gallery and used the 3d head scan, bettercallsal..gallery was born!
- sal decided to continue the portfolio tradition, and build a real non jokey portfolio of his music projects: bettercallsal.rocks was born!
- with the desire to launch the multiver, we decided that we should take down the fitness videos we had saved at the onset of the pandemic in 2020. Sal selected his favorite 12 videos in various categories and recoded a live interpreation of them guerrilla style.
raed: decided to replatform and explore Next.js. It is a perfect tool for static rendering. Each website is a single page app. I was already very comfortable with React. Styled components made sense given the quirky design. Instead of using JSON to render on the client side, Next.js allowed me to render everything once on my machine and publish static page that performed well and had good SEO