Trafikkskiltene.no is a site for learning the Norwegian traffic signs, and the first real project I shipped: I built it when I was fifteen, to learn the signs before my tractor licence. It is still live at trafikkskiltene.no, and its successor is Veivett.
Built to pass my own test
When I started practising for my licence, I could not find a good, free way to drill the signs, so I made one. The site shows every official sign with its explanation, sourced from Statens vegvesen, and has quizzes, a read-aloud mode, and a page for every sign category. Everything was written by hand, without frameworks.
What happened next
I passed the test. The site kept going. It found its audience through search, without any marketing, and has since passed 750,000 page views. The advertising on it has earned money every year since launch, with very little maintenance: the site has run largely unchanged for years, through my studies, while I moved on to other work.
What it taught me
Trafikkskiltene was my real introduction to programming, and to everything around it. JavaScript was my first language, learned by writing this site, together with HTML and CSS. PHP followed, and I learned more of it through later projects. The rest of the education was practical: buying a domain, setting up an Apache web server through cPanel, and learning to manage a live website that people I had never met were using.
Beyond that, it taught me things no course did. Shipping a small thing that answers a real need beats planning a large one. Search traffic compounds when the content genuinely helps. And a website can be a source of income, not only a hobby.
The site teaches the signs, but the theory test is bigger than the signs. In 2026 I rebuilt the idea from scratch as Veivett, a study tool for the whole theory test.