Why I Built an Anti-Baby-Shower Website

In November 2025, I had a problem. My partner and I wanted to celebrate an anti-baby-shower. A satirical party to honor the fact that we're intentionally childfree. But how do you invite people to something like that? A WhatsApp message felt too boring.

Instead of accepting the usual, I did what developers do. I built an entire website. With an RSVP system, canvas animation, and 383 tracked user interactions. Five days, four evenings, one weekend, 877 lines of code.

Sounds like a pointless project. It was. But honestly? It was educational.

The result: anti-baby-shower.party. A complete event platform for the anti-baby-shower with personalized invitations, an RSVP system, a countdown timer, and an animation where sperm cells burn. Yes, really.

Why Anti-Baby-Shower?

The name sounds provocative. That's the point.

According to Pew Research, 12% of married couples with at least one spouse in their 30s or 40s live as DINKs (Dual Income, No Kids). But here's what I find more interesting: 47% of childless adults under 50 now say they probably won't ever have children. In 2018, it was 37%. That's not a small shift. I think we're looking at something bigger here.

And yet? There are baby showers. Gender reveal parties. Christenings. Everything possible for parents. But for people who are intentionally childfree and happy? Nothing.

So I invented one. The anti-baby-shower.

The Anti-Baby-Shower Concept: Victorian Mourning Meets Jazz Age Rebellion

The idea hit me while scrolling around late one night. What if you took the over-the-top mourning rituals of the Victorian era and flipped them satirically? With the anti-baby-shower, we symbolically "mourn" the death of society's expectation that we have children. But at the same time, we celebrate. Like the Roaring Twenties, when everything old got thrown overboard.

Black and gold color palette. Elegant typography. And in the middle of it all? Burning sperm cells.

It's absurd. It's supposed to be absurd. That's probably what makes it funny.

The Tech: 5 Days From Zero to Launch

The whole thing took me about 5 days. Four evenings after work and one Saturday. The project lives in a PintRush Rails 8 stack I already had running. With my custom web apps service, I can build similar projects for your events too. Fast and tailored.

What I Built

Personalized Invitations. Every guest gets a unique code. Their name appears directly on the page. Not a generic "Dear Guests," but "Hey Marcus, we're looking forward to seeing you on November 8th." On the page, you see your face (from the guest cards), your status ("Confirmed," "Declined"), everything personal. That's the difference between "another invitation" and "wow, I was actually invited."

RSVP System. Confirmations, declines, guest counts. All in the database, all trackable.

Flip Clock Countdown. The classic mechanical clock look, animated until the event date.

Wisdom Box. Rotating quotes about childfree living. "Peace is a gift you give yourself" and similar nonsense. Meant ironically, of course.

Guest List with Live Count. Who confirmed? How many are coming? Updated in real time.

Calendar Download. ICS file for direct import into Google Calendar or Apple.

Bilingual. German and English. Not all guests speak German.

The Animation: 877 Lines of JavaScript

The centerpiece is the PixelFire animation. A canvas-based burning effect with a particle system.

Honestly? Claude AI wrote probably 90% of the animation. I set the direction, specified the color palette, then started criticizing.

The first draft ran. But it looked like a mistake. Choppy, the particles frayed weirdly, the performance was mediocre. So I told it: "This doesn't work. Make the particles more transparent and tie it to requestAnimationFrame."

Claude revised. Better. But not yet "Yes, that's it." Third version: smooth. Fourth: I think that was the one. 877 lines later, we had something that looked like hand-written code using requestAnimationFrame, syncing the animation with the display's refresh rate.

What burns? Sperm cells. What else. The burn percentage increased as the anti-baby-shower date approached. A visual countdown of sorts.

The Challenge: Animations

Honestly, the backend was boring easy. Rails RSVP? Ten minutes. Countdown? Twenty minutes. But the animation and the imagery? They nearly drove me crazy.

Claude wrote the animation code fast. But "fast" didn't mean "good." The first version was performance-heavy, the particles showed unwanted streaks, and the fire looked like... well, not like fire. Fifth version: finally okay.

The images were even worse. AI-generated images for a Victorian mourning style often look kitschy. Too kitschy for the irony to land. I needed eight different prompts and two tools to get something I was happy with.

Building with AI is strange. You need to know what you want, but also accept that the first attempt won't be perfect. Claude understands "Make me an animation with particles" immediately. But "Make me an animation with particles that feels like fire"? That takes four iterations and exact feedback. Not because Claude is dumb, but because aesthetics are subjective. At least that's what I've found.

The Results: Real Numbers

The anti-baby-shower party happened on November 8, 2025, in Duisburg, Germany. Here are the numbers.

383+ Burn Completions. That's how many times people watched the burning animation all the way through. I track this with a BurnCompletion model that stores IP, user agent, and timestamp.

6 Full Features. RSVP system, personalized invitations, flip clock countdown, PixelFire animation, ICS calendar export, and live guest list. Not a landing page. A complete platform.

Guest Reactions. They were completely surprised. Lots of laughter. Several asked if I could build something similar for their events. Other couples who also want to celebrate being childfree and happy, and need a spectacular platform for it. If you want to understand how I develop and what projects shaped me, check out my professional background, from RLTracker to today's work.

What I Learned

AI Collaboration Isn't "AI Writes Code"

Claude Code isn't a tool that writes code while you drink coffee. It's more like a partner that's faster than you, but not necessarily smarter. You still need to know what you want. You need to test the stuff. You need to say: "This is crap, try again."

With this animation, I probably could have written it alone. But that would have cost 2-3 days. With Claude AI as a development partner, companies can speed up their development in a similar way. For APIs, automations, and complex problems: 4 iterations in 8 hours. The time savings are real. But not because Claude "does everything." The feedback loop is just faster.

Borderline Useless Projects Are Fun

I love building things that are essentially unnecessary. But I think these projects show what's possible. They're extravagant, funny, and memorable.

A standard invitation would have worked too. But would anyone have talked about it? Probably not.

Themed Event Websites Are Underrated

Most event invitations are boring. A link to Eventbrite, an invite in some event app, a WhatsApp group. But a custom website with its own domain, animation, and personalized greeting? That's a different level entirely. At least from what I've seen.

The Website Is Still Live

The website is still live: anti-baby-shower.party

The event code doesn't work anymore (the party was in November), but you can see the whole setup. The animation, the personalized greeting, the countdown. Feel free to play around with it.

And if you think this is cool and wonder: "Can I build something like this for my event?" The answer is yes. If you need a themed event website yourself, whether for your own anti-baby-shower or a completely different concept, write me at daniel@samer.email or contact me on yixn.io. The core system is modular. The aesthetics and content can be customized. Let's discuss what's possible.