This was a fantastic writeup!!! Congratulations on the website. To me, though, the writeup is what you should be most proud of!!
> Building the site in two days with little regard for scale was a good choice.
Probably the key takeaway that many early-career engineers need to learn. Scaling's not a problem until it's a problem. At that point, it's a good problem t have, and it's not as hard to fix as you might think anyway.
Recent and related:
One Million Checkboxes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40800869 - June 2024 (305 comments)
These are fun projects. About six years ago I launched Pixmap on android, which is a little collaborative pixel editing app, supporting larger images (like 1024x1024 grids etc). I had a queue that would apply each event to png images, and then clients would load the initial PNG on connect, and then each pixel draw event is just one small object sent to the client. This way I could take advantage of image compression on initial load, and then the change sets are very small. Also, since each event is stored in a log, you can "rewind" the images [0].
[0] 22mb: https://blog.winricklabs.com/images/pixmap-rewind-demo.gif
Nice write up - curious much did it end up costing?
As someone new to backend - is there a simple alternative architecture for this project? I hope there's an easier way to host a million bits of state and sync with clients. Some of the solutions in the post went over my head.
Kudos to the author - your projects are great.
Awesome !
Will your next post be a statistical analysis of which checkboxes' were the less/most checked ?
I remember scrolling way down and being kind of sad that the one I choose was almost instantly unchecked.
Is the game still live?
When I go to https://onemillioncheckboxes.com/ nothing is checked and in the JS console I just see
{"total":0,"totalGold":0,"totalRed":0,"totalGreen":0,"totalPurple":0,"totalOrange":0,"recentlyChecked":false}
Here's the opposite of your scalable implementation: 1mil checkboxes in under 1000 characters! (Deno)
https://gist.github.com/jeff-hykin/4cdebafd8698298d021f103e2...
> This also validated my belief that people are hungry for constrained anonymous interactions with strangers.
This project won't be complete until it supports the elusive "indeterminate" state of the checkbox.
TIL you can run Lua scripts on your Redis server. That's so nice, I never knew!
Really cool, awesome followup to the original project.
Would you be willing to share your nginx config?
Many lessons learned along with great historical knowledge of (distributed) systems.
I think you hit every type of interruption and point of failure, except storage space, and it is great to see your resolutions.
I wasn't aware Redis could do the Lua stuff which makes me very interested in using it as an alternative state.
As for the bandwidth - one of my biggest gripes with cloud services as there is no hard limit to avoid billing overages.