Nordic.js: Building Distributed Systems
James Simpson
 · 
November 6, 2019

Working with cutting edge technology at GoldFire Studios has afforded me the opportunity to share what I've learned with the community by speaking at development conferences all over the country. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to take those lesson overseas when I spoke at the incredible Nordic.js conference in Stockholm, Sweden in October.

While I've spoken at events like SxSW, TEDx, ThunderPlains, LibertyJS and more, none could quite match the unique flair that was Nordic.js. Whether it was the saunas, giant ball pit, barber shop or tattoo parlor, the quirkiness of this conference made it truly one to remember.

But, it wouldn't be a great conference if it didn't have great speakers, and it absolutely delivered on that front as well. I was honored to be included in such a lineup where I, along with the 1200 in attendance, learned from a diverse set of speakers from all over the world.

My talk was actually inspired by our work on CasinoRPG. We ran into growing pains as the user-base expanded as well as server failures and other issues that would cause frequent outages. We needed to build a fully distributed system to achieve a more reliable and stable experience for our players.

In my talk, I demonstrate the basics of the approach we took and how it can be applied to a wide variety of applications. This begins at a high level and then deives into a practical live coding demo that puts the concepts to work. Besides the above video, you can also find the slides and code here.