## Notes [[Lichess]] is an open-source chess application that handles a large number of users on a variety of devices. It's quite amazing what a team of 2 developers have done. [1 Lichess Developer - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VSVfQcaxFY) talks about [[Thibault Duplessis]] and how he created a massive free chess web application by himself, his journey, and his philosophy. ## Main Takeaways - He kept the UI minimal and focused on user experience - He used the smallest libraries and took away dependencies that would otherwise slow down everything - *Lichess* operates primarily as a monolith with only a handful of microservices - He outsourced the mobile app work to Flutter - Used the right tool for the right job - Backend is primarily written in Scala - Used Rust for OS-level operations - Used Snabbdom because of its DOM handling - Optimized based on observability--changes were driven by current needs instead of market hype - Uses [[MongoDB]] but not critical and could work on [[PostgreSQL]] - [[Redis]] provides a layer of abstraction so that *Lichess* can deploy updates with minimal disruptions