CoRecursive: Coding Stories – Episode Summary Title: Story: One Million Checkboxes - The Viral Game That Defied Convention
Host: Adam Gordon Bell
Guest: Nolan Royalty
Release Date: February 3, 2025

Introduction

In this captivating episode of CoRecursive: Coding Stories, host Adam Gordon Bell delves into the intriguing journey of Nolan Royalty, a software developer renowned for his unconventional and viral web creations. The episode, titled "One Million Checkboxes - The Viral Game That Defied Convention," explores Nolan's early fascination with coding mischief, his evolution into game development, and the unexpected viral success of his project, One Million Checkboxes.

Early Mischief and Tinkering

Nolan's passion for pushing technological boundaries traces back to his high school days. Adam reminisces about Nolan's childhood exploits, highlighting his playful yet impactful tinkering with computer systems.

[02:03] Nolan Royalty: "There’s some through line from that to plenty of the stuff that I do now in terms of, like, how can I misuse this thing in a way that's kind of fun?"

Nolan recounts a memorable incident involving the Student Wide Information System at boarding school, where he and his friend Brody engaged in a playful battle of email rule manipulation. Their antics, intended as harmless fun, inadvertently caused the school’s email server to crash for days. Instead of punishment, Nolan was met with laughter and encouragement from the dorm supervisor, an experience that profoundly influenced his future endeavors.

[05:18] Nolan Royalty: "That's hilarious. That's so funny."

Pursuit of Game Development

Transitioning from his mischievous beginnings, Nolan ventured into game development after accumulating enough resources from his managerial role at Jane Street, a trading firm. His approach was methodical yet experimental, focusing on creating numerous small games to hone his skills and gather feedback.

[06:16] Nolan Royalty: "One common failure mode for people who try to make games is that they're like, oh, I really love whatever. So I'm going to build a big MMO and don't think about how that takes years for a team of hundreds."

Nolan's strategy emphasized rapid development and iterative learning, aiming to understand what works by completing and testing each game. This philosophy led him to the Recurse Center, a coding retreat that became pivotal in his creative process.

Joining the Recurse Center

At the Recurse Center, Nolan immersed himself in a community of like-minded individuals dedicated to intensive coding and collaboration. Here, he participated in workshops and collaborative projects, further refining his skills and expanding his creative horizons.

[08:38] Adam Gordon Bell: "The Recurse center wasn't just about solo coding marathons either. They had workshops."

One notable project was a Mastermind game developed entirely using SQL queries, showcasing Nolan's knack for innovative problem-solving and his ability to make complex tasks enjoyable.

Building and Launching One Million Checkboxes

The genesis of One Million Checkboxes began as a spontaneous collaboration between Nolan and his friend Neil. The concept was deceptively simple: a website laden with a million checkboxes where any action on one checkbox would reflect universally for all users.

[20:39] Adam Gordon Bell: "The pitch to Neil for 1 million checkboxes is simple. It's a website with a million checkboxes on them. If you check one, it's checked for everybody else. That's it."

Driven by a desire to create something quickly and gratifying his urge to ship a project, Nolan developed the site over a weekend. Launching on a Wednesday, the site quickly garnered unexpected viral attention, amassing around half a million unique visitors and 50 million checkbox interactions within the first few days.

[25:20] Nolan Royalty: "I think there's something like 500,000 unique IPs there. It's hard to know sometimes people are going to be like, many users are behind the same static IP at a school or whatever."

The simplicity of the idea belied the technical challenges Nolan faced, particularly in scaling the application to handle the immense load while maintaining real-time responsiveness.

Community and Collaboration

The unexpected popularity of One Million Checkboxes fostered a vibrant community centered around the site. Nolan discovered a Discord server populated by enthusiastic teenagers collaborating to draw intricate patterns and images using the checkboxes, effectively treating the site as a massive, interactive canvas.

[42:38] Adam Gordon Bell: "Nolan created 1 million checkboxes without a fixed grid because he wanted to stop people from drawing offensive images."

These community-driven efforts demonstrated the site's potential as a platform for collective creativity and playful subversion, aligning with Nolan's original vision of constrained chaos.

Technical Challenges and Solutions

Managing a million checkboxes in real-time presented significant scaling hurdles. Nolan leveraged Redis for efficient state management, utilizing its bit set capabilities and Lua scripting for atomic operations. Despite these strategies, he encountered unforeseen issues such as excessive bandwidth usage and data validation errors, which threatened the site's stability.

[28:04] Nolan Royalty: "Redis has a count of the number of boxes checked, stored separately, just so that we don't have to iterate through a million things to determine how many are checked."

When faced with escalating bandwidth costs, Nolan collaborated with a friend at Facebook to optimize the server performance, transitioning from a Python Flask application to a more efficient Go-based system. This rewrite significantly reduced CPU usage and improved overall performance, ensuring the site's continued operation amidst its viral popularity.

[33:14] Adam Gordon Bell: "Part of the big rewrite was moving from an untyped Python flask app to go."

Despite the technical prowess, Nolan discovered a subtle violation in his data validation, allowing persistent, pattern-based interactions that were initially mistaken for bugs but later identified as sophisticated bot-driven behaviors orchestrated by the community.

[39:42] Nolan Royalty: "This isn't hacked. This isn't. I have a bug. This is like, someone who is being very persistent about writing a weird message into my database."

Reflection and Impact

The success of One Million Checkboxes had a transformative impact on Nolan, validating his approach to constrained, interactive design and reinforcing his belief in creating platforms that encourage playful engagement within defined boundaries.

[46:58] Nolan Royalty: "This felt like it really validated this thesis that I had had from back when I made Stranger Video."

Nolan's journey from high school digital mischief to creating viral web phenomena underscores the profound influence of early experiences on one's creative and professional trajectory. The episode concludes with Nolan reflecting on the emotional and professional fulfillment derived from seeing his creations bring joy and foster community interactions.

[48:45] Nolan Royalty: "Providing people a very low stakes way to troll, where the worst thing you can do is uncheck a checkbox is great, right?"

Conclusion

Adam Gordon Bell wraps up the episode by celebrating Nolan Royalty's innovative spirit and his ability to transform simple ideas into engaging, viral web experiences. Nolan's story exemplifies the powerful intersection of creativity, technical expertise, and community engagement in the realm of software development.

Adam Gordon Bell: "Thank you, Nolan, for pushing the boundaries. You're clearly one of the world's experts at twisting things beyond their intended use for our amusement."

Listeners are encouraged to explore Nolan's projects at eieio Games and join his growing community to stay updated on his latest creations.

Notable Quotes:

• Nolan Royalty [02:03]: "There’s some through line from that to plenty of the stuff that I do now in terms of, like, how can I misuse this thing in a way that's kind of fun?"
• Nolan Royalty [05:18]: "That's hilarious. That's so funny."
• Nolan Royalty [46:58]: "This felt like it really validated this thesis that I had had from back when I made Stranger Video."
• Adam Gordon Bell [25:20]: "50 million checkboxes. Half a million people. These numbers are wild, right?"

This episode offers a deep dive into the innovative and sometimes chaotic world of viral web development, showcasing how playful experimentation can lead to unexpected success and meaningful community engagement.