The serverless gambit: Building ChessMsgs.com on Cloud Run

Interesting read how Greg Wilson built ChessMsgs.com, a website that can track chess games played by sending links to eachother.

Instead of tweeting moves back and forth, players tweet links back and forth, and those links go to a site that renders the current chessboard, allows a new move, and creates a new link to paste back to the opponent. I wanted this to be 100% serverless, meaning that it will scale to zero and have zero maintenance requirements.

The board’s state is represented as a string using the Forsyth–Edwards Notation (FEN)

rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR w KQkq - 0 1

That same FEN is also fed to service that generate static images of the board for use in the meta tags.

The serverless gambit: Building ChessMsgs.com on Cloud Run →
ChessMsgs Source (GitHub) →