nearby

05 Sep 2018

Nearby was a small idea that came up from somewhere—I’m not really sure where—but it was supposed to be pretty simple. Oh! I remember where it came from—I was thinking about gossip and how news and information can spread but also become very isolated. So the idea was to create something kind of like twitter but when you posted a message, it would only be received by the people physically closest to you.

So what would that look like? I’m not really sure, I’m also not really sure at all why this is useful or desired, but it was fun to think about while creating it. Basically, some user A creates a post and it gets sent to user B. User C is too far away from A but close enough to B to see their reply. C only sees one side of this “conversation”.

I ended up building an entire little service in AWS using API Gateway, GraphQL, Lambda, DynamoDB, React, S3, and CloudFront. There are a lot of bugs and no users, so I’m not going to share the URL. However, it is really interesting to actually build a full production-ready, serverless, scalable, buzzword-worthy service and have it cost virtually nothing (by virtue of nobody using it—pay for use).