I'm Scott

• Developer for over 20 years
• Primarily build for the web
• Founder / early-stage for most of my jobs

Oh, hello

• Love automation and solution design

What is Homebrewery?

A site that allows you to create beautiful homebrew D&D content with just Markdown

D&D?
Dungeons and Dragons - Shared story telling and improv game

Markdown?
Human friend text that turns into HTML 

Brief project timeline

V1

• Weekend project

• Just Editor and PDF exporting

• Launched on Heroku

• Weekend project

• Just Editor and PDF exporting

• Launched on Heroku

• Shared to smaller subreddit

• Lots of positive feedback

• Tons of suggestions

Result?

V2

• Lots of positive feedback

• Added DB (still no accounts)

• Dual key system for editing and viewing

• Expanded the markdown parser

• Improved Styling

• Allowed HTML

• Huge usage uptick

• Shared to main subreddit

• Lots and lots of bugs/issues

Result?

V3(ish?)

• Added accounts (no email! 😭)

• Added main site (bad idea)

• Expanding Markdown syntax even more

• Trolling/hacking

• Backwards compatibility issues

• Community issues: Legal, reddit mods, support

Result?

How it Works

Editor + Preview

• Codemirror as editor + custom syntax highlighter
• Very custom CSS styling for the D&D look
• React.js as UI framework
• Fontawesome for icons
• Less for styling, no style frameworks
• Partial Page rendering
• Use of print media queries

Hosting and Infrastructure

• Heroku for server
• Autodeploys from Github master to staging
• Manual promotion to production
• MongoDB for database. Two table system.
• Logging via Papertrail (lots of trail and error)
• Heroku handled traffic spikes

Frontend Tooling

• Vitreum: a react.js build system we developed at Thalmic Labs.
• Uses Browserify, React, and LiveReload
• React component => Bundle.js + HTML
• Allows for custom transforms such as css and images
• LiveReload built in, watches project + hotreloads changed files via websockets

Backend Tooling

• Express.js for server
• Simple scripts for compiling Less styling
• Salted hashed passwords

Thanks!