blunder.io
blunder.io is a web based chess platform. It features 1vs1 matches in realtime, over 5 million puzzles and deep insights into player stats. blunder.io was my first bigger private project during the second year of my apprenticeship. To todays’ standard it lacks a lot of security features and the code is like a hate speech against all best practices. Nonetheless it was a fun project which actually was used a couple of times and I gained quite a lot of experience on how to handle bigger projects and how not to.
How it started
There was a phase with a massive online chess hype and as every other young adult I hopped on the train too. Since coding was a hobby of mine I always seeked the next big and fun project and with this hype came the idea to build a platform for my friends and me to play chess on. As I was pretty bad at chess and made a lot of blunders, the name “blunder.io” was born. Quick fun fact: The domain blunder.io was already taken so I had to use this scammy looking domain “blunderio.xyz”.
How it ended
After the initial release and a couple of games nothing really happened anymore. I lost interest in continuing this project because it was a complete mess in the end and would have needed a massive amount of work. Chess is cool but we also preferred to play on big platforms like Lichess or Chess.com instead of using a half working private project. There were a few attempts for reworks of the project, but they were all abandoned within the first couple days. It’s still in my mind to make a nice rework of this project some day, but I think this will stay in the backlog for a few years or maybe even centuries…
Technical details
Technologies
- Java
- Spring Boot
- JavaScript
- React
- TailwindCSS
- MySQL
- Docker