What started as a basic software systems course project just got a massive 6-hour architectural overhaul. I wanted to build ARENA, an identity-verified multiplayer Tic-Tac-Toe game where your face is literally your password.Here is the breakdown of the sprint to get to v1.0.0:The Biometric Overhaul (Moving to the Edge)
Originally, the facial recognition was a heavy, monolithic server-side pipeline. It was a dependency nightmare and crushed the server. I completely ripped it out and migrated to Edge ML using face-api.js. Now, the client browser computes 128-d facial encodings directly on the user’s GPU. Server load dropped to near-zero, and the latency is basically gone.The Microservice Migration
I took the original god file and shattered it into a clean microservice architecture. Containerized the whole thing using Docker Compose. It now features a resilient Python backoff/retry loop so the FastAPI backend waits patiently for the databases to initialize before booting.The Local Network “Final Boss”
This was the hardest part of the overhaul. I wanted users to connect via their phones on the same Wi-Fi. But Chrome strictly blocks webcam access on unencrypted HTTP connections unless it is localhost.The Fix: I set up an Nginx reverse proxy to route frontend and API traffic through a single port. Then, I wrote dynamic JavaScript routing and piped the whole thing through an ngrok tunnel. Now, I can spin up the containers, run the tunnel, and send friends a secure HTTPS link to play against me locally! It was a crazy 6 hours of fighting WebSocket race conditions and Nginx regex bugs, but ARENA is finally production-ready (I hope :) ).