BF Paint
Background
At BuzzFeed, folks in the tech organization have a tradition of playing virtual Pictionary every Friday, as a way to have fun and be chaotic with coworkers. Sadly, we noticed there were a lot of shortcomings with our previous choice of pictionary application. We weren't able to play in a single game with more than 11 people, U.S slang frequently confused a lot of our non-American engineers, and it frankly didn't feel as "BuzzFeed-y".
Solution
During our 2020 Hack Week, some other engineers and I built our own Pictionary web application themed à la Windows 98, using React, Redux, Node and Socket.io, that featured real-time chat, fuzzy word matching, and even AI-powered word detection. I wrote the real-time room joining functionality, and helped write the state management logic between the server, rooms and the users within the rooms. It was a really interesting lesson in seeing how various parts of state had to be maintained as data flowed in a big event-based system, and the end product was ridiculously cool!