Women in Tech: Global Map 🌍💖

Laura Norwood — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 15:11:07 +0000

This is a submission for Weekend Challenge: Earth Day Edition

What I Built

Women in Tech — Global Map 🌍💖

An interactive, pixelated 3D globe that visualizes the percentage of the tech workforce that is female in countries around the world. The project highlights the global gender gap in technology through a beautiful pink-themed, retro-pixel aesthetic.

Features

3D Rotating Globe — A low-poly, flat-shaded icosahedron globe that auto-rotates and can be dragged to explore
57 Country Data Points — Pixelated box columns rise from each country, with height and color mapped to female tech participation rates
Interactive Tooltips — Hover over any country marker to see its name, percentage, region, and a progress bar
Stats Panel — Live stats including global average, country count, highest (Philippines 46%), and lowest (Pakistan 9%)
Pixelated Retro Style — Low pixel ratio rendering, flat shading, scanline overlay, "Press Start 2P" pixel font, and crisp-edges rendering
Pink Aesthetic — Entire color palette in shades of pink, magenta, and rose — from the deep dark background to glowing markers and star field

Demo

Open index.html in any modern browser — no build step or server required!

Code

GitHub Repo

A single index.html file using:

Three.js (v0.170) for 3D rendering via ES module imports from CDN
OrbitControls for drag-to-rotate and scroll-to-zoom interaction
Pure CSS for the pixel UI, scanline overlay, and pink theme
Inline data sourced from World Bank, UNESCO, Deloitte, and McKinsey reports (approximate figures)

How I Built It

The globe is an IcosahedronGeometry with flat shading to get a low-poly, pixelated look. The renderer pixel ratio is intentionally set low (1/3) so the entire canvas renders at a fraction of screen resolution and is scaled up with image-rendering: pixelated — giving everything that chunky retro-pixel feel.

Each country is represented by a BoxGeometry column positioned on the globe surface using lat/lon → spherical coordinate conversion. Column height and color both encode the female tech workforce percentage, creating a gradient from deep magenta (low %) to bright pink (high %).

A raycaster handles mouse hover detection on the 3D markers, showing a pixel-bordered tooltip with country details. The scene includes a pink star field, latitude/longitude grid lines, a glow shell, and a CSS scanline overlay for extra retro vibes.

Prize Categories

Best Use of GitHub Copilot

Useless Enterprise App

Laura Norwood — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 11:31:25 +0000

This is a submission for the DEV April Fools Challenge

What I Built

I built a Useless Enterprise App™ that looks dangerously close to something you’d be forced to use at work… but is entirely designed to waste your time.

It’s a React-based “Business Request Alignment Interface” that simulates a full corporate workflow, complete with forms, approvals, dashboards, and system feedback. None of it actually achieves anything.

Key features (all technically functional, strategically pointless):

A Save button that runs away from you when you try to click it
A form that introduces new mandatory fields after submission
A fake approval process requiring an “Approval Readiness Reference Code” that never existed
A progress bar that confidently tracks nothing
A system status panel that cycles through corporate nonsense like “Consulting the alignment committee…”
Error messages such as: “Success could not be completed successfully”

It’s not broken. It’s just… like this.

Demo

Demo: Best experienced emotionally rather than functionally.

Run locally and experience:

Fill in the form like a responsible adult
Try to click “Save” while it actively avoids you
Discover a new required field that wasn’t there before
Finally submit… and get a failure toast anyway

It’s basically every bad internal system distilled into one app.

Code

Lanthanum89 / useless-enterprise-app

This is a submission for the DEV April Fools Challenge

What I Built

I built a Useless Enterprise App™ that looks dangerously close to something you’d be forced to use at work… but is entirely designed to waste your time.

Key features (all technically functional, strategically pointless):

A Save button that runs away from you when you try to click it A form that introduces new mandatory fields after submission A fake approval process requiring an “Approval Readiness Reference Code” that never existed A progress bar that confidently tracks nothing A system status panel that cycles through corporate nonsense like “Consulting the alignment committee…” Error messages such as: “Success could not be completed successfully”

It’s not broken. It’s just… like this.

Demo

Demo…

View on GitHub

Everything behaves exactly as designed, which is the problem.

How I Built It

Tech stack:

React (functional components + hooks)
Pure frontend state, no backend, no persistence, no consequences
Tailwind for layout, plus aggressively offensive inline styling

Approach:

Model real enterprise UX patterns (forms, approvals, dashboards), then deliberately sabotage them
Focus on process over outcome, just like real enterprise software

Design choices were intentional:

Comic Sans + pastel gradients to simulate “legacy system that somehow still exists”
Overcomplicated UI hierarchy with zero payoff
Feedback loops that sound important but do nothing

Prize Category

Community Favourite

Because nothing unites developers faster than shared trauma from systems like this.

Forem: Laura Norwood

Women in Tech: Global Map 🌍💖

What I Built

Features

Demo

Code

How I Built It

Prize Categories

Useless Enterprise App

What I Built

Demo

Code

Lanthanum89 / useless-enterprise-app

What I Built

Demo

How I Built It

Prize Category