I've had the honour to build clickclickclick.click (frontend/backend), with the truly unique team at Studio Moniker in Amsterdam.
I was quite inexperienced - 1 year after graduating from art school - when I joined and started working on this project. The server went down 5x in a single day because of all the requests. We were using web sockets (simple node server with express + socketio and a react + rxjs frontend) and that put some strain on the server. And I made the rookie mistake of storing images directly into the database instead of in a S3 bucket. Also we chose CouchDB, which saves document revisions (I didn't know..) so at the end of the day the database took 100% disk space and I couldn't SSH into it anymore. There were something like 20M+ database writes within 24hrs of the launch because it went viral.
We span up larger DO droplets several times because of this issue which took a while to fix.
It was my first time setting up / working with a VPS and nginx + sockets as well, so I'm actually quite pleased with only 15-30mins downtime overall on launch day :)
I learned a lot during that time (it was made in 2016), especially with the help of HN. Projects are often developed by junior devs or people skilled in other areas. Some experience is useful when deploying scalable apps. Nowadays it's much more easy with services like Vercel/Cloudflare/Heroku/AWS/etc. We used SFTP to deploy the site. I think I moved it to a Docker container some time after that.
I'm still using DigitalOcean to this day for my personal stuff, only now I use Dokku + Cloudflare - which works like a charm.
Check out https://studiomoniker.com if you want to see more crazy projects! (They're my previous employer FYI).
Fantastic projects there. I'm interested in "Red Follows Yellow Follows Blue Follows Red". It seems like it would be tons of fun for school kids. I can see a kit of headphones and capes being something a teacher could use to have a fun activity without too much work.
I was quite inexperienced - 1 year after graduating from art school - when I joined and started working on this project. The server went down 5x in a single day because of all the requests. We were using web sockets (simple node server with express + socketio and a react + rxjs frontend) and that put some strain on the server. And I made the rookie mistake of storing images directly into the database instead of in a S3 bucket. Also we chose CouchDB, which saves document revisions (I didn't know..) so at the end of the day the database took 100% disk space and I couldn't SSH into it anymore. There were something like 20M+ database writes within 24hrs of the launch because it went viral.
We span up larger DO droplets several times because of this issue which took a while to fix.
It was my first time setting up / working with a VPS and nginx + sockets as well, so I'm actually quite pleased with only 15-30mins downtime overall on launch day :)
I learned a lot during that time (it was made in 2016), especially with the help of HN. Projects are often developed by junior devs or people skilled in other areas. Some experience is useful when deploying scalable apps. Nowadays it's much more easy with services like Vercel/Cloudflare/Heroku/AWS/etc. We used SFTP to deploy the site. I think I moved it to a Docker container some time after that.
I'm still using DigitalOcean to this day for my personal stuff, only now I use Dokku + Cloudflare - which works like a charm.
Check out https://studiomoniker.com if you want to see more crazy projects! (They're my previous employer FYI).