Bill Clinton Swag was one of the many viral memes during the 2020 lockdowns. It was a result of a stupid side project I built in college. This talk goes over how it came to be, and all the technical issues I dealt with scaling the project from 0 to over 40M users in a 2 week period.

1. Bill Clinton Swag
How
Came to be
@thmsmlr

2. 2013
University
It started back at

3. STAT 121
I was failing,
Side Project
I needed a

4. https://thewolvesiandii.tumblr.com
Roommate’s Brother’s
Tumblr

6. Posted
…Nothing

7. New York
2014

8. A few years later…

9. ▲Vercel
2019
Rewrite
Time

10. On my
iPad
Because why not?

11. First in Poland 🇵🇱

12. Then in Mexico 🇲🇽
& Brazil 🇧🇷

13. Then in US 🇺🇸
& UK 🇬🇧

14. Then it
became an Instagram
Challenge

15. That’s when
Everything
Broke🔥 🔥 🔥

16. Rate Limits

17. Signed up
For 10
Developer
Accounts
Solution!
🙃

18. Rate Limits
More

19. Scrape HTML
Solution!
🙃

20. AWS λ limits

21. ▲Vercel
to the rescue
Cache-Control: s-maxage=86400

24. Bandwidth
Limits

26. We’re stable
Finally,
😅

27. Hell of a ride
wish i enjoyed it more

29. 15 Minutes
It was a fun

30. 3 Take Aways

31. Just build
First,

32. Never delete
Second,

33. Use a Cache
Third,

34. @thmsmlr