How we recreated r/place with 10 lines of SQL

On April 2nd, 2022, Reddit experienced a temporary outage, rumored to be linked to the second r/place event, a large-scale social experiment where millions of internet users competed to place 160 million timestamped pixels on a shared canvas over four days, peaking at over 8,000 write events per second. The event posed significant challenges in building high-concurrency, low-latency data applications, which were recently addressed in a live coding session by two developers using Tinybird and JavaScript to recreate and extend the 2022 canvas without complex infrastructure or backend setup. The session highlighted the efficiency of Tinybird, allowing the developers to manage streaming events with minimal code and offering easy-to-use ClickHouse® functions for real-time data processing. The backend required just 58 lines of SQL code, leveraging Tinybird's ability to convert data processing nodes into parameterized API endpoints with a single click, while the frontend, comprising 343 lines of code, demonstrated the simplicity and power of using Tinybird for such demanding applications.