Real-Time Prototype Apps
- » info: proto-poker
- » info: proto-retro
Four sibling prototype apps, all private repos, all built on the same lightweight real-time stack:
| App | Description | Repo |
|---|---|---|
| proto-poker | Free, no-signup planning-poker tool. Create a room, share the link, vote on a Fibonacci deck, reveal together. | eswat2/proto-poker (private) |
| proto-retro | Sibling to proto-poker, mirroring its architecture: a team retro board (Went well / To improve / Action items) with the same hidden-until-reveal mechanic. | eswat2/proto-retro (private) |
| proto-bbot | Slack bot that tracks teammates' birthdays and announces them in-channel via a daily cron job. | eswat2/proto-bbot (private) |
| proto-draw | Weekend PoC: collaborative Pictionary-style drawing. Samples the active stroke every 150ms and relays each segment via SSE to every client in the room. | eswat2/proto-draw (private) |
All four run on plain Vercel serverless functions with Upstash Redis for state and Server-Sent Events for realtime push — no accounts, no subscriptions, no third-party realtime vendor. Frontends are Web Components with zero build tooling.
proto-poker and proto-retro aren't just demos — they're in active use for engineering agile ceremonies (sprint estimation and retros) at Shield Legal LLC.
proto-draw is purely exploratory, not production use like poker/retro. The 150ms stroke-sampling rate that makes drawing feel smooth also means it writes to Redis far more aggressively than the other three apps — enough to burn through an entire day's free-tier usage in a single active session. It exists to test whether the same architecture holds up under a much higher write rate, not as a tool meant for daily use.
Live URLs are intentionally omitted here: all four run on free-tier Upstash Redis, and this wiki is publicly crawlable — linking the live apps directly would invite traffic that could burn through free-tier rate limits (proto-draw especially). The repos are private, so a repo link wouldn't be useful to a reader either.
proto-poker and proto-retro's specs (not source) are published separately and publicly in proto-specs, used as a cleanroom-implementation benchmark for coding agents. Independent cleanroom builds from those specs, by Grok and Antigravity, are archived in spec-cleanroom.