Metadata

Periods:

• December 2021 - January 2022
• July 2022 - present

Role: Full-stack developer, founder

Tech stack: Next.js, Ably, QStash, Redis, Auth.js

Links:

• GitHub
• Hosted

Project description

Bytecrowds is a free, open-source, real-time platform that allows you to share and enforce authorization for code snippets. Adopting the serverless architecture and its own, privacy-respecting analytics engine, it offers a reliable and secure way to quickly obtain sharable links of your code.

My role

I have developed and maintained most of the Bytecrowds code, consulting with industry experts on niche cases.

Challenges

Before settling on serverless, Bytecrowds’s API was written in Go and the WebSockets server was a Node.js template from Yjs. From there, I have refactored the app to use serverless functions (Vercel serverless functions and Cloudflare Workers) and, with help from the wonderful team at Ably, managed to pull off an entirely serverless, auto-scaling, real-time CRDT-based text-sharing provider.

I also believe in the idea of using a Redis-compatible database as the primary one, which brought Upstash in the stack to support both the main database and the analytics engine.

One of the most difficult problems I faced was the possible duplication of multiple clients’ text when trying to either pull the bytecrowd from the database or do a check on the front-end to see if it was already fetched from other peers. After trying multiple ideas, I managed to introduce the following logic:

• When a request is made, it first goes through a Next.js API route which fetches the number of connected users from the Ably REST API.
• If there’s no connected peer, the text will be inserted into the CodeMirror editor from the database. Otherwise, it will be fetched when syncing with the other peer or peers.

The value I provided

I believe that such projects, especially when able to be kept add-free, provide the community with reliable tooling for possible everyday use cases and also encourage the adoption of new software currents such as serverless.