My colleagues and I thought it would be fun to combine our web development skills with our passion for digital asset creation to build something fresh: a unique digital texture marketplace.
We wanted to create a space where artists and creators could easily share and sell their creations, making it simple for users to find high-quality assets for their projects.
Out of this idea textureset.com was born.
From the start we weren’t exactly sure how many users would be interacting with our site. This unknowiness was an ample excuse to architect everything as scalable as possible.
Attempting to keep architecture complexity to a minimum & retain developer cohesivness I went for the following setup:
This allowed an extremely rapid development on all sides of the application. Vercel’s ability to completely streamline CI/CD process and handle infintely scalable web architecture was a total game changer for us.
Supabase allowed very easy management of our PostgresDB. The simple client API allowed us to focus less on the intricacies of the database and focus effort on a great UI.
Looking back our biggest hurdle was choosing Svelte as our UI framework. Many, many features required us writing low level components & integrations that other frameworks already have support for. It was a great experience learning and developing on Svelte but much time could have been saved using supported libraries in a (at the time) more mature framework.
A big win for us was blob storage. From the start I knew we’d potentially need storage for hundreds/thousands terabytes. Our assets sometimes come in extremly large sizes (3g+). Pairing large file size with the need for multiple asset qualities per type (Without downscaling on the server) estimates ~30-80GB of content per asset on the marketplace. Generally its a no-brainer to go for something like Amazon S3; I wanted something a little more unusual. I ended up wiring a content delivery solution with Backblaze B2. Backblaze is a company who generally handles large scale data backups. It turns out their blob storage was extremely cost efficient and content delivery times were very fast. It was relativity simple process wiring B2 into the application, we found the complexity ended up on our tooling side.
Lots of hard work and dedication went into creating our digital marketplace. From brainstorming sessions to late-night coding marathons, every step brought its own set of challenges and victories. We’re thrilled to share our story and can’t wait to see how it evolves. Thanks for joining on this adventure. 🚀