Last weekend, we hacked together the fastest multiplayer document on the market. Here’s how we built it, why we built it, and what we plan to do with it.
How did we get here?
We are a team of HUGE Cloudflare fans, so when they announced their Spring Development Challenge centered around real-time collaboration tools we jumped on the opportunity. This was the perfect excuse to both hone in our skills and integrate cutting-edge features into our final product. Thus we set out designing our multiplayer system, with Cloudflare’s infrastructure at the center of it.
The Lab 🔬
After an intense weekend of problem solving, we’d built a no-bells-and-whistles multiplayer markdown document. We sat down side by side to test the collaboration, and found messages were clocking in at 50ms between the two of us! We got on a team member across the atlantic and found latency topping out at around 120ms. You could be typing on your phone and looking at your computer and you wouldn’t be able to tell. You don’t have to take our word for it, pull out your phone and try it yourself!
Why we are excited about it
Respecting our users’ time is a priority to us; some other great time-saving softwares include Cron and Superhuman. With these fine measurements we are concerned with something different: making latency becomes invisible. With a bit of fine tuning on our end, we believe we can pass that threshold.
It became apparent during the pandemic that, relative to real-time, collaborative software is quite slow and unresponsive. Pull up Miro, Figma, or even Google Docs side by side with a friend - you’ll be able to notice the lag. At Velocity, we’re making collaborative software truly real-time.
What we are working on now
The Cloudflare-powered collaboration system we’ve built is now a core element of our full product: a digital office for remote teams.
We believe that the highest operating companies of the next decade will be made up of tight, semi-autonomous remote teams. To be effective, teams need to be in constant communication with external actors - customers, partners, and other teams. Velocity offers the tools to easily structure, collaborate on, and manage these remote conversations.
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