The friction we're optimizing against
Most of the time someone lands on a reference site, they arrived from a search result with one specific question. The distance between "I have a question" and "I have my answer" is the entire product. Every login wall, every "sign up to keep reading," every cookie-consent dark pattern adds seconds to that distance, and seconds are the whole game when the alternative is a different search result one tab over.
So the rule is simple: nothing on Cloud Tech by Victor is ever gated behind an account. Not cheat sheets, not interview questions, not roadmaps. If we ever find ourselves designing a feature that only makes sense with a login, that's a sign the feature doesn't belong here, not a sign we need auth.
What this actually rules out
Concretely, this means Cloud Tech by Victor doesn't have, and isn't planning to add, user accounts,
saved/bookmarked articles, tracked roadmap progress, personal dashboards, or any premium tier. Those
aren't oversights or a "v2 roadmap"; they're explicitly out of scope in how we build (see
AGENTS.md's "Things We Do Not Build" list, which every change against this repo is checked
against). A roadmap page can describe an ordered path through topics without ever knowing who's
reading it or how far they've gotten, and that's by design, not by omission.
The technical side of the same decision
This isn't just a policy; it shapes the architecture. Cloud Tech by Victor has no database, no session layer, and no server-side mutation routes, because there's nothing that needs to be written on your behalf. Every page is generated at build time from files in this repository and served as static HTML. That means the fastest possible page load isn't a performance optimization bolted on afterward; it falls out naturally from not having accounts to check or state to load first.
Where the money comes from instead
Cloud Tech by Victor is ad-supported (Google AdSense, off until we're approved), not subscription-supported, another consequence of the same principle. An ad slot might sit in a sidebar or after an article; it never blocks content, and it never requires you to have logged in to see the page around it. Free means free for everyone who lands here, not free-with-a-catch.