About.

PlayVessel is a gaming backlog tracker that I created to solve an issue I was having with my other hobby, video games, I own a lot of games and I buy them faster than I can play them, so I created this to help me organize them and play through them quicker! It totally worked, rather than just playing the video games more, I started another big project :). In all seriousness though, it has helped me a lot, and I'm very proud of it.

Challenges.

PlayVessel has been my most complex and daunting project to date, and over the year I've worked on it so far I have had many challenges. The first notable one was the fact that I started working on it in just plain React and Vite, on the client-side, which naturally as the site got bigger and bigger, led to just incredibly slow performance. PlayVessel was the reason I started learning server-side rendering, and started using Remix.run which I have grown to LOVE.

Another massive challenge I dealt with was the IGDB API, not because it's bad, but because of the amount of data that becomes available to you, my game data ingest system went through revision after revision, overhaul after overhaul, seeing massive speed boosts seconds at a time. I learned a lot about concurrency and data manipulation as well as efficiently database operations.

Aftermath.

After working on PlayVessel for a year now as of writing I can confidently say that it's been my best work that I've ever done. I learned so much not just through coding the thing, but how to manage a website efficiently as well as servers and CDNs and using the resources given effectively. While PlayVessel may have not been a big success, it did get some users and that's awesome. Ultimately it didn't make sense to keep running with no revenue and I ended up sunsetting it. It was a good learning project and it absolutely will lead to bigger and brighter things moving forward.