> Just about any developer could build something like this in under a month
Wh.. what?
Wh.. what?
Or did they think they could handle all the scale and all the random small features on the site too?
That’s a lot of time! I think I could clone this in that time. And I’m a Linux kernel programmer with little web experience.
With modern tooling and documentation this kind of project is within reach for many.
Yeah, one line of kernel code is more difficult to write than 100 lines of web code.. but you're going to be churning out 10,000 lines of web code, and every layer of abstraction you try to use will make everything crappier and more screwy
This page isn't a normal website either, so a lot of those website toolkits won't be of much use
You just need to host a single-tenant db, handle auth, manage users, and allocate blob storage for each user. This is all pretty well understood on the backend now with baked turnkey solutions on every major cloud provider.
The app logic can all be done clientside and can be done pretty easily in react / vue / whatever framework you want. Most of the apps can be wired to existing solutions on npm.
So mainly all you need to do is customize some css and bring it all together, deploy & deliver the app itself, and market it.
I’m not sure but I don’t see any x86 virtualization here, seems to just all be JS, so it looks to me to be a very straightforward implementation (correct me if wrong)
I'll finish it one of these days..