There isn’t much to grr.fyi feature-wise - it’s a url shortener with an interface unmistakably “designed” by a backend engineer. It’s value lies in what it allows me to do and what I use it for.
A url shortener is the smallest (scope-wise) webapp worth being called one. It needs to store some state, show some snappy performance regardless of the load, and be available with good reliability and decent UX.
A “20 Questions”-type game implemented on the Pimoroni Picosystem - a Raspberry Pi Pico packaged like a tiny game console.
I got some inspiration from the original patent, prototyped the system in an Elixir Livebook and implemented the game itself in C++.
The livebook stores the bulk of its data on an instance of CloudNativePG deployed to my home kubernetes cluster. The cluster was also useful for feeding the game logic with data - I obtained the reference answers by querying a local Ollama instance using ollamex, which is basically an Elixir implementation of a local-model friendly LiteLLM.
For some context: Recently I’ve been sharpening my Kubernetes skills by setting up a small 6 node k3s cluster at home. The place I currently live doesn’t have a public IP address, so I chose to set up a Cloudflare Tunnel to expose services to the internet.
I chose to have the cloudflared daemon running on the host machines and the overall setup quick and pain-free. The whole thing seemed to work well, but I noticed that over time (within hours) the tunneled services would start responding more slowly and eventually Cloudflare would display 523 errors.
