Side Projects: The Unsung Heroes of Software Development
summary
A weekend project becomes poe.ninja, a Path of Exile economy site built with ASP.NET Core, C#, TypeScript and React that processes ~500 TB of API data and serves 2–4 million pageviews per day. It targets a single CPU core design early, pushes most work to the front end, then adds a tiny custom column store using bit sets—bit sets are magic—to answer complex filters in ~1–5 ms, proving the idea scales and remains maintainable.
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chapters (22)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:30About Rasmus
- 1:45What is a side project
- 2:27Four main reasons to start a side project
- 4:10Internal reasons to start a side project
- 4:37Advice for starting a side project
- 5:36Examples of side projects
- 7:56What is Path of Exile
- 8:21What Path of Exile does well
- 9:28Path of Exile Gameplay
- 11:12Project Scope
- 12:38Constraints
- 13:45Single Core
- 15:44faceted search
- 17:52site overview
- 21:51profiling
- 24:32incremental learning
- 26:10evolution of infrastructure
- 29:20its a side project
- 35:13a weird side project
- 41:04Recap
- 44:29Leagues
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