How 1 Software Engineer Outperforms 138 - Lichess Case Study

This is a case study on the Lichess product. A free and open source chess platform with over 4 million monthly active users and 1 core developer. The stack he uses is Scala, MongoDB and Snabbdom hosted on bare metal. This is an incredibly interesting project that I enjoyed studying to understand productivity.

This is a new format so I'm interest to hear your feedback. I had a lot of fun studying this project.

References

Timestamps
0:00 - Intro
0:29 - Story to kill retention
3:51 - Scala
6:20 - Play Framework
7:00 - MongoDB
9:16 - Snabbdom
11:17 - Architecture
15:47 - Flutter
16:01 - Developer Mindset
18:21 - Openness
18:45 - Key Takeaways
21:51 - Lichess Patreon

[Sameer.Trivedi]

No meetings, no jira tickets no PO, PM & SM breathing down your neck. Sounds like a very productive environment to me 😅.

[hookflash]

A programmer who actually gives a sh*t is an order of magnitude more productive than one who doesn't.

[misnad]

My respect for Lichess just skyrocketed after watching this. I've always loved Lichess, but never knew it had one core devoloper.

[CrisTekk]

Your typical 138x engineer, every company needs one

[lenz]

Chad open source mantainer vs virgin(s) corporate programmers

[ViperLarry-vp]

Saw he uses NixOS in his streams. Knew he was absolutely cracked immediately.

[Ankh.of.Gaming]

A good developer writes code. A great developer removes code.

[jefferymuter]

Id love there to be a series on this. Finding projects that outpace competition bc of tech stack & caring devs vs bloated companies & tech stacks.

[fakt]

This is a prime example of how incomprehensible a gap between a productive developer and an average middle/senior developer is. Many sites are much simpler than Lichess and they still need dozens of developers to survive, not talking about other personnel. Deployment part is especially impressive, considering all aggressive kubernetes propaganda that you somehow need a cluster for each and every app, even if it has no more 10000 average users per month in a hope that someday it will gain millions of users. This OG just uses one bare metal server that manages 5kk games per day. It reminds me of Telegram that while being one of the most popular social networks in the world is maintained by 30 engineers and one PM that is Pavel Durov himself. But Lichess example is even more extreme. We live in a world of lies, of lies and incompetence. But on the bright side it's still impressive.

[RequiredAccountsSUX]

So the 100x programmer is not a myth after all, eh? 🙂

[jds]

A super interesting, in-depth discussion of this open source project, the most inspiring programming related video I have seen recently! I am not a chess player, so I was not too aware of lichess, but now I am very impressed. It is always nice to see what a focus on simplicity and quality and the absence of managers and investors can bring about. Lichess is a project that really deserves financial support.

[simpleman]

Honestly, this guy, one man army, deserves a lot more salary. Obviously, money isn't leading driver for him, but I hope he'll still gonna get a lot more, he truly deserves it. What a guy!

[merluzzo]

I feel like I learned something technical while watching someone finally tributing LiChess for what it is, both technically and ethically. Thanks for your video.

[d_]

I have been working in a Scala codebase now for 6 months. I can see where Kotlin gets many of its traits from. This codebase was written by inexperienced devs, the code is a nightmare to work with. Projects with good languages can be brought to its knees by junior devs.

[ajeybs]

Thanks. Never knew lichess was open source too being managed by one person. This is a focused and passionate achievement we all should be acknowledging

[oghenemarho]

Thank you for this video, it is great to see the mindset of such a high level programmer like Thibaut !

[nightshade]

love this video, shows large scale real-world application architecture done by one person at scale is not only possible but enjoyable, a man after my own heart

[youcefmoulla]

As a flutter developer and a chess player, I feel ashamed that I haven't contributed to this amazing project yet!

[jakisajordan]

This is an impressive case study, super insightful!

[aronhegedus]

As shown in the video (not sure if mentioned), the analysis is done on a distributed network of people offering up their CPU % in something called fishnet. It was cool to feel like a part of lichess when doing this myself, and it's also really nice to be able to see source code!