Building Sidequests by ibbe

We are starting a new initiative called Sidequests by ibbe, a series of gatherings held twice a month for anyone who enjoys learning new things purely out of curiosity. The goal is to create a relaxed yet structured space where people can step away from their daily routines and look into interesting subjects together. Twice a month, we host these meetups to spark good discussions, connect motivated people, and learn about topics we rarely encounter in school or work life.

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The idea is simple. Most of our days get filled with deadlines, meetings, and routine tasks tied directly to work or school. Sidequests creates room for something different: a couple of hours every two weeks set aside purely for curiosity, with structure loose enough to keep things relaxed and tight enough to keep the conversation focused.

ibbe's design language[1] ranks among the most beautiful systems I have worked with. Every time I open it, the experience feels like a pleasure rather than a chore, and that made the start of this project an easy one.

When the time came to build the web page for this project, my first plan was to go with the familiar combination of Next.js and the ibbe cloud stack. That changed while scrolling through Twitter, where I came across an announcement from Framer about their 3.0 release, complete with agents, branching, a community feature, and a fresh design. Curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to give it a try.

Building Sidequests by ibbe ended up happening entirely inside Framer[2]. The process moved quickly thanks to the agents feature and the set of skills I had built earlier, which made the whole setup feel almost effortless. Framer made this part of the build genuinely simple since it works as a design tool first, so most of the work happened through visual editing rather than writing code from the ground up.

Along the way, we also decided to add a new blog dedicated to Sidequests, kept separate from ibbe's central blog. This space exists purely to share stories from our events and let people learn more about what happens at each gathering.

For form submissions, we connected Formspree[3] through Framer's native plugin. The plugin handled the connection directly, letting every submission flow straight into Formspree with minimal setup.

One part of the setup that gave me trouble was connecting ibbe Cloud's email sending service through Framer. I tried calling the worker directly, but the attempt fell short and the connection stayed broken.

Overall, this build turned into a good example of choosing the right tool for the moment rather than sticking to an original plan out of habit. Framer covered most of what we needed quickly, while the email worker connection remains the one piece left to revisit later.