Really, really interesting read. I use env vars daily, and it never occurred to me how they actually work. It shows how many things we take for granted have such interesting implementations. :)
Great job! But what really caught my attention was that map — the 3D structures are perfect, and I was able to see my own building. Does anyone know which one it is?
Pix is amazing, really. The technical side is incredible—I remember reading or watching some really good content about the architecture, but I can’t recall exactly where and haven’t been able to find it again. All payments have to be completed in under 100ms, which is impressive considering how resilient the infrastructure needs to be to handle thousands of transactions per second.
I once looked at the requirements to be able to handle all the debit/credit transactions in the US, and you can do that on _one_ mid-range server easily. With regular PostgreSQL, no need for anything exotic.
Of course, the real deployment will need redundancy, failover, multiple levels of audit records, etc.
