Excalidraw: Under the hood of the virtual whiteboard
summary
Project begins January 1 2020 as a hand‑drawn whiteboard prototype and quickly becomes a live app using Rough.js for handwritten Bezier curves, prototyped in CodeSandbox and published via Vercel integration. Rendering caches both computed Bezier paths and pre‑rendered canvases to go from hundreds/low thousands at 60 FPS to handling tens of thousands of elements. Multiplayer uses per‑element version counter plus random tiebreakers and tombstones for deletes. End‑to‑end encryption puts keys in the URL hash with Web Crypto and a funded SaaS (Excalidraw Plus) supports eight full‑time developers.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Excalidraw introduction
- 2:52Rendering under the hood
- 7:07Large document performance
- 8:53COVID-19 multiplayer rise
- 10:17Simple sync for collaboration
- 12:24End-to-end encryption
- 15:55Open source funding challenges
- 17:39Excalidraw Plus business model
- 18:42Key takeaways
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