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) →

Published by Bramus!

Bramus is a frontend web developer from Belgium, working as a Chrome Developer Relations Engineer at Google. From the moment he discovered view-source at the age of 14 (way back in 1997), he fell in love with the web and has been tinkering with it ever since (more …)

Join the Conversation

1 Comment

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.