Diary of an Indie Hacker — Entry 5: The day the server ran out of memory. Repeatedly.
Day five: three viral caption styles ship — and a day-long fight with memory limits that ended with a humbler number.
Originally written November 10, 2025
Shipped three viral caption styles today — the bold, punchy, word-by-word kind you see on every clip that does numbers. They look effortless on screen. They were not effortless off screen.
We fought memory issues all day. Rendering animated captions means generating frames, and frames eat RAM like it's free. The caption duration limit went 20 seconds → 25 seconds → 15 seconds, which is not a roadmap, it's a negotiation with a server that keeps falling over.
The order matters: 20 sounded nice, 25 was optimism, 15 was what the machine could actually survive. You don't get to pick your limits — you discover them, usually at the worst time, usually in production.
Also fixed caption positioning bugs nobody will ever know existed. That's most of software: the best work is invisible because the failure it prevented never happened.
Next entry: four more caption styles, URL import, and the version number that meant "long clips work now."
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