Do you have any blog posts about the process of making this? I see the technology link, but I'd like to hear a little more about the architecture. Something along the lines of a post mortem maybe.
* What sparked this idea?
* Was your initial set of features more simple or more complex?
* Any features you had to give up on?
* Any unexpected features you were able to add after you were forced to rearchitect it? (Ok, I may be painting my own experiences on you with this question.)
* How long did it take?
I haven't written a post mortem yet, partly because I'm still building it, and partly because I hadn't seen it under heavy load (although I woke to emails from linode screaming at me about high CPU usage)
* The idea is one that I've been toying with for years. I've made other experiments that got some notice here a few years ago, too.
* There are some extra features that I still want to add at some point ('formations' for pre-building shapes, as an example. The database table is there, but no functionality.)
* Nothing given up on entirely yet.
* The only rearchitecting that happened was replacing the board UI with a canvas implementation. The initial version used a table and was painfully slow. From past experience I knew that wouldn't cut it, but it was an easy starting point.
* the initial commit was... October 2nd, but I didn't start working on it till a week later. All in all, I've just grabbed time between other (paying) projects.
Really nice implementation btw.