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At the end of 2021, Netlify ran a challenge called Dusty Domains. The idea was simple: take a domain you bought and never used, put a website on it, and submit it by December 31. For every site, Netlify gave $50 to charity, and nine other companies matched it. Each site sent $500 to Code2040, Resilient Coders, STEMTank and Black Girls Code, and the challenge raised $100,000 in the end.
The rules asked for very little. "Big, small, useful, or completely silly projects are all encouraged," the page said. I liked the last part.
Three days after Christmas
I had a few free days between family celebrations, from December 27 to 29. That was not enough time for anything useful, but it was enough for something silly.
So I wrote a small Hello World experiment. It puts a button at a random place on the page, paints it a random color, and removes it when you click it. Then it adds another one, and another, faster than you can click. The buttons pile up on the screen, and you try to clear them. Or you give up.
I called it useless random color buttons, in lowercase, because that's exactly what it is. Version 1.0.0 went live on December 29, 2021, on a domain that had been sitting unused for a year, and it appeared in the Dusty Domains showcase. Then I went back to the work that pays the bills.
Almost four years later
In November 2025, I gave the app a home on this site with version 2.0.0. It's a complete rewrite, still in vanilla JavaScript and Tailwind CSS, with no framework.
The idea stayed the same, but there is more to play with now. The buttons can show their hex color code, a number or a timestamp. The app counts the buttons it created, your average clicks per second and the time you spent. And you can give up at any moment with the Esc key.
It runs in two ways. The web app works in any modern browser, and you can install it on your phone or desktop. The portable edition is a single HTML file, under 100 KB, that runs offline on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. There is no executable file, on purpose: a native build with a tool like Electron would weigh hundreds of megabytes, for a game about clicking buttons.
The unexpected praise
I didn't expect a three-day experiment to be reviewed at all. Then, a few weeks after the release, MajorGeeks gave it the verdict "Potentially Addictive", and Softpedia called it "quite addictive" and suggested it for short breaks from work. TrishTech described it as "a Zen escape from mundane".
A user, Fred de Vries from Harlingen in the Netherlands, wrote: "All programs that appear online are designed to do a specific task. Yup, they are therefore tediously useful. But here, finally, there is a program that is designed to be totally useless." You can read all of them on the reviews page.
Try it
You can run it in your browser or download it. It's free and open source under the MIT License, and the code is on GitHub. If it makes you smile, feel free to drop a star there.
Thanks to Netlify and the matching companies for the push.