Reddit Place and how they did it

Reddit did an amazing thing recently, that gave every user the possibility to place exactly one pixel every 5 minutes on a gigantic drawing board. What the community made of this was pretty incredible.

There were multiple Linux and video game logos, country flags and a ton of other stuff. I merely helped out keeping the tux (as seen above) in a good shape and revert stray pixels on its white belly ;)

Here's a time-lapse of how the board changed over the duration of the project:

Today Reddit blogged about how they executed the project from a technological point of view, I can only recommend you check out How We Built r/Place on their blog. The post covers their use of:

• storing the board as a bitfield
• redis
• websockets
• rabbitmq