How my site trains.fyi hit the front-page of Hacker News

Yesterday my site, trains.fyi went to the front-page of Hacker News, which has happened to me a few times with other projects, but is no less of a thrill. Here are my thoughts.

The Traffic

The Show HN post went to the front page, reached the third spot, and got about 450 points in total. From this, my site had about 10k users over the course of the day. This is actually lower than I expected, since when hey from the future went to the front page, it got about 100k - but I'll welcome the traffic no less.

The Infrastructure

Since I'm using a combination of Google Cloud Storage to serve JSON, and a static file hosted on github pages, the surge was without incident (except when I made a bad deployment last night to fix some attribution issues). It also cost me in total about $0.20 to deploy and serve - which is not bad imo.

The Feedback

Perhaps the most important is the feedback from others. Not all feedback on Hacker News will be valid. You learn, after putting things out in the world, that some feedback will just be given with the intent of being negative. Fortuantely, I find this to be the minority. A lot of the feedback I got in the comments (and to my email - people will always email) helped me in fixing small issues, and adding new data sources.

Overall a successful launch! Now if only I could build something that makes money.

Happy building!