Breakscale

I built a thing, put it online, and then the week got away from me.

BreakscaleCopied!

Last week I started a system design simulator because I fumbled a system design question in an interview. This week it went public.

Build a system on a canvas, drag the traffic up, and watch it fall over. Every number comes out of an actual discrete-event simulation, so nothing on screen is a fake animation. Everyone tells you to add a cache. Nobody shows you the cliff. The retry storm example goes from 0% failures at 80 rps to 93% at 85, and you can sit there and drag it back and forth across the edge.

It's open source, MIT, live at breakscale.tech, repo at github.com/xevrion/breakscale.

I spent Friday and Saturday shipping into it more or less continuously: dark theme, a real phone layout with sheets you can swipe away instead of a squeezed desktop, pen and touch input, handwritten annotations in Caveat, a minimap, save and open and share with a .breakscale file, SVG and PNG export, request tracing that splits queued time from service time, and a cloud vendor picker where components get sized from cited AWS, Google and Azure specs and the design tells you what it would cost to run. Then challenge briefs, so you get a goal instead of an empty sandbox, with hints when you ask and the reasoning once you pass.

Then Saturday happened.

4,096 visitors and 4,922 page views, and 3,000 of those came straight from one link on X.

311 stars and 36 forks as I write this, from 8 on Thursday. And the part I did not expect at all: people started sending PRs. Shashank-Tripathi-07 got the tests and build running on Windows instead of just Linux, and fixed a test path resolution bug. yashksaini-coder fixed jsdom's localStorage on Node 26 and made the app say what a design is actually made of rather than just how big it is. Two strangers found real bugs I had shipped.

There are still good first issues sitting open if anyone wants one. Trackpad pinch doesn't zoom in Safari, the object store isn't getting autoscaled, snap-to-grid needs a keyboard toggle.

I also bought the domain. Was going back and forth between .io, .tech and .dev and went with .tech.

1,000 followersCopied!

Same weekend.

A year and a bit to get here, and most of it happened in the last two months. Next stop is 5,000, apparently.

What else I worked onCopied!

• doubletake: a gateway that gives every AI answer a second look before you act on it. Self-check across policy, detectors and audit, a model-based safety pass, async recall-and-correct, and a dashboard over the whole thing. Built for the Accenture Innovation Challenge.
• thy-xev: added the Giza photos to Egypt on the places page, and put Resonance and Crimson Desert in the games backlog.

Also: the Visa OA happened, and it was rough. People brought phones into the hall and cheated openly, and I don't think there's any real chance out of it. And Accenture auto-rejected me on eligibility about ten seconds after I submitted the registration form. People told me I'd probably typed a passing year or a college name wrong. I filled that form very carefully and I don't think I did. No way to appeal it either way.

Three of my friends got Microsoft internships this week. Genuinely happy for them.

What I found interestingCopied!

• ai-job-search : a job search framework that runs on your own machine, built on Claude Code. Evaluates postings, tailors CVs, preps interviews. Fork it and own it.
• stargazer and github-stars-video : both make a video out of your repo's stargazers. I found these for extremely transparent reasons.
• Cat-Printer : drives those cheap bluetooth thermal cat printers from anything.
• pipecd : one CD tool for applications, platforms and operations.
• Watched Reducible's FFT video for DAA. Genuinely one of the best explanations of anything I've seen.

RandomCopied!

My laptop uptime this week was 12 hours 48 minutes one day and 17 hours 3 minutes another. Those are two different days of just sitting there working.

Someone in the journal server asked if I'm a cyborg. Fair.

Got a few Claude guest passes, so friends can try it for a week. draexon and kavya took two of them almost immediately.

Sat in VC with bharat, eg and berlin watching beastboyshub speedrun Elden Ring. He was on the Draconic Tree Sentinel at an hour and fifty. Everyone else in the call was a cat, an egg, and another cat.

Played FreeGuessr with the same three and lost, badly. I was closer to Kansas than the actual answer and that was somehow still not enough.

Watched the GTA 6 Extended Look on Netflix in a watch party with eg and some others.

And watched ohnepixel play How to Fish, which is exactly the kind of thing I put on while doing something else.

Also decided I want to make my room minimal and get some string lights. That's the plan. That's as far as the plan goes.