Fuck Yeah Nouns
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This document describes the development and scaling challenges of a simple web application called Fuckyeahnouns that generates images with text overlays. It was initially built in two hours but struggled to scale to thousands of requests per minute. The developers encountered issues with image APIs banning their IP and copyright violations from user-generated t-shirt designs. They open sourced the code while admitting it was written hastily and not well structured. Overall it conveys the story of rapidly building a viral web app that faced unforeseen complexities in scaling and monetization.
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Fuck Yeah Nouns
- 1. Wednesday, March 23, 2011
- 2. Simple Concept Wednesday, March 23, 2011
- 3. Simple Concept Wednesday, March 23, 2011
- 4. Simple Concept Wednesday, March 23, 2011
- 5. Overview 1. do an image search for term 2. Download 鍖rst result 3. Overlay text on image 4. Display image to user Wednesday, March 23, 2011
- 6. Simple Execution ...built in two hours Wednesday, March 23, 2011
- 7. Not so Simple Scaling Downloading, resizing, and compositing 2300 images per minute is hard. Wednesday, March 23, 2011
- 8. Intermission 1 Wednesday, March 23, 2011
- 9. Initial Architecture Used Google Image Search API Processed Images with ImageMagick Cached images on disk in webroot Hosted on a single VPS with several production systems... Wednesday, March 23, 2011
- 10. Initial Timeline Saturday, 11:50pm: Posted to Reddit Saturday, 11:53pm: Realized this was a bad idea. Saturday, 11:54pm: Started tweaking it run on Heroku Wednesday, March 23, 2011
- 11. About Mind-blowingly simple platform for running Ruby applications Scales LIKE A BOSS Doesnt have a writable 鍖lesystem Wednesday, March 23, 2011
- 12. Changes Required! Rewrote to stream images and cache in a reverse caching proxy Switched the DNS over to Heroku ...and that worked, for a while Wednesday, March 23, 2011
- 13. Intermission 2 Wednesday, March 23, 2011
- 14. New Development Sunday, 2:20am: Reddit frontpage Sunday, 2:21am: FYN hits 1500 requests per minute Sunday, 2:25am: Google Image Search bans our IP range. Shit. Wednesday, March 23, 2011
- 15. Solution: Wednesday, March 23, 2011
- 16. Yahoo!s BOSS API Is awesome. Does not ban you after four minutes. Has much, much less relevant images. ...often with hilarious results. Wednesday, March 23, 2011
- 17. Intermission 3 Wednesday, March 23, 2011
- 18. Monday Morning 2300 requests per minute Enlisted Stefan and Tim to help Fairly high estimated hosting bill. Wednesday, March 23, 2011
- 19. Wednesday, March 23, 2011
- 20. Monday Afternoon Decided $800/mo with no revenue is not okay Added a link to GET THIS ON A FUCKING SHIRT!, and AdSense. Wednesday, March 23, 2011
- 21. Intermission 4 Wednesday, March 23, 2011
- 22. Ten Seconds Later Decided selling shirts with copyrighted material is probably pushing it Wednesday, March 23, 2011
- 23. Three Hours Later Got 43 emails from CafePress telling us that about 400 shirts violated copyright and had been removed Only three people had bought shirts ...so we removed the button. Wednesday, March 23, 2011
- 24. AdSense, though... Wednesday, March 23, 2011
- 25. And now no one cares. Peak: 2,720,000 pageviews Yesterday: 149,000 pageviews Wednesday, March 23, 2011
- 26. Donation! (AdSense revenue) - (Heroku bill) goes to SkullSpace Probably about $500 Wednesday, March 23, 2011
- 27. Intermission 6 Wednesday, March 23, 2011
- 28. Its Open Source! github.com/burke/fuckyeahnouns Wednesday, March 23, 2011
- 29. The code is horrible though. I wrote most of it after midnight on a Saturday. Dont judge me. Wednesday, March 23, 2011
- 30. Wednesday, March 23, 2011