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I made a full-stack connect 4 game hosted on AWS EC2 using React and Node.js.

TLDR

One day I was bored at work because my tasks are getting monotonous. It was the same frontend task every day for the past months. I was worried about my career because being a web developer means that I should know about the Frontend and Backend side of development. At this time, I only did frontend tasks and can barely remember how to do backend.

So I decided to make some project at home to kill some time and re-learn everything. A basic crud is boring, I wanted to make it enjoyable and what is more enjoyable than programming a game? I researched and pondered in making a Unity or Godot game but ultimately decided that it would take too long. It isn’t even related to web development haha.

So why a connect4 game? Well, because it’s easy to understand, multiplayer and I found a decent design on frontendmentor. I downloaded the assets and started working.

In this project I learned how to use sockets.io and postgres for database. Why use a database? Because I initially planned to add some features like History, User Data, Matchmaking etc. But as the project continues, it became clear that it would take a long time to do for a small sized project meant to be made for fun. I still kept the invite user to play though, even if it doesn’t work most of the time.

I hosted it on AWS after learning how to make an ec2 instance. I was worried about the costs, so I made a fail-over site and set it up such that the ec2 instance will only stay up for 1 hour before shutting down. You can read more on how that works here.