from Hacker News

Show HN: An infinite shared pixel art canvas

by seangransee on 10/11/24, 7:30 PM with 3 comments

This is a fun project I’ve been slowly improving over the past few years. It started as a fun technical experiment and has grown into a canvas where over 300 million pixels have been placed, one pixel at a time.

It’s a single realtime canvas shared by everyone around the world. And when I say it’s global, I truly mean that. Communities have popped up everywhere from Germany to Japan to Azerbaijan. It even had quite the following in China before it got banned by the Chinese firewall.

I call it an “infinite canvas”, but of course, infinite values don’t exist in computing. See if you can find the edge ;)

  • by seangransee on 10/11/24, 8:15 PM

    Happy to answer questions about this project!

    I've been using this project as a way to play with tech I don't typically use day-to-day in my paid work.

    It's gone through a bunch of iterations. It started almost entirely on AWS serverless services (Lambda, Dynamo, etc). That ended up being ridiculously expensive for this use case, so now it's a boring Go app on a cheap VPS talking to Postgres.

    The mobile app has also gone through some iterations, starting as a wrapper around a web app (CapacitorJS), and is now using React Native instead.

  • by bambielli on 10/11/24, 9:36 PM

    Hello Sean, long time listener, first time commenter. Huge fan of your work.