
Show HN: MyDeskTour – Show off your desk setup - jonathancai11
https://mydesktour.com/
======
jonathancai11
I just realized that this got reposted, so just getting to these comments.

I guess its clear this implementation is quite garbage and doesn't scale - I'm
using Apollo GraphQL and polling for updates which is probably overloading the
backend. Seems like the pages/content will not even load for many of y'all.
Issues might also be from my Google Cloud Platform setup.. Will investigate
tonight.

Really sorry to have wasted some of your time :(

Thanks to all giving feedback anyways!

 _UPDATE_ : Now thinking my MongoDB Atlas cluster was the problem. Did not
expect many (or any) visits/requests, so I was still at the free tier which
only allowed 500 connections at a time. Just upgraded so I'm hoping this
solves some problems..

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atonse
Congrats on the Hacker News hug of death. Wishing you the best of luck on this
project and hope you are able to repost it after putting it behind a caching
layer or two.

~~~
jonathancai11
Haha hug of death sounds about right. Thanks!

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stevesearer
I created Office Snapshots 13 years ago and naturally like these sorts of
sites.

One of the hardest parts will be getting content over the long term. 99% of
ours is submitted at this point, but it took years of emailing people to get
enough new stuff coming in on it’s own. At this point we publish ~15-20
projects per week.

If you could get people to give a quick synopsis aBout why they selected 2-3
items on their desk it would probably help people know why they might want to
buy as why as SEO.

Good idea and will keep an eye out for you in the future!

~~~
jonathancai11
Wow Office Snapshots looks incredible. Yeah UGC seems to be the big bottleneck
initially, as I'm finding out right now.

Do you mind sharing why you initially started Office Snapshots?

I ask because I suspect there was something far significant than "I thought it
would be cool." This project is showing me how important it is to really love
what you do - otherwise the amount of effort it takes to get something off the
ground and self-sustainable is just truly back-breaking. I've probably spent a
month on this project and I'm already getting exhausted. Starting to think its
mainly because I just don't care enough about desks and desk setups in the
first place.

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stevesearer
It was definitely an “I think that would be cool” type of thing.

Office design wasn’t my passion by any means, and I don’t think it is now in
the specific sense, but I do have a passion for curating and organizing the
largest selection of office design imagery and information.

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jonathancai11
Longer explanation: I originally came up with the idea when I was looking for
a new mouse for my WFH setup. There are hundreds of product review sites, but
nothing like seeing what other people use. I know there are many popular
subreddits like r/battlestations or r/workspaces, and even sites like
deskhunt.com, mysetup.co, yourstack.com and kit.co, but I thought it be nice
to have a dedicated site for this kind of thing. Not really sure what the
differentiating factor is right now, but just wanted to get this prototype out
there :)

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p_l
OK, positive part first :)

I really like the concept and it seems you have something interesting for
start to see, which is always good. Nice to see a rather clean way to comment
on designs.

Could use a nice way to zoom images on site, plus a link to more details if
there's some (for example, in the entry about desk found on medium).

Now for slightly less cheery part :(

Please, please change the implementation.

The page is really, really slow on a fscking 300 MBit/s connection, seems to
prevent opening specific desks in new tab, and most of the time seems to have
no content because some JS code haven't finished whatever it is doing.

It's also non-navigable using keyboard.

~~~
jonathancai11
Thanks so much for the detailed feedback!

The less cheery stuff is certainly hard to hear, but is what I need to hear,
so I appreciate it. There is clearly something really really wrong with either
the GraphQL server hosted on GCP or with how I'm fetching it from the
frontend. Really need to dig into this.

What do you mean by non-navigable using keyboard?

~~~
p_l
EDIT: Just checked in DevTools, it hangs on query to the graphql server for a
really long time. I mean, sure, the page is probably slashdotted right now,
but it seems a bit too prevalent - and definitely doesn't have a good UX when
doing so.

Maybe server-side generation with cache would help initial load?

Still a problem when I don't remove uBlock.

As for keyboard, there seems to be some unclear to me focus grab which meant
that I couldn't even attempt to scroll the page using arrow keys. Mind you,
it's not just your site that does it, usually it's related to someone being a
bit too fancy with autofocus on a searchbox. Not sure how to help there, web
frontend is not exactly my forte :)

~~~
jonathancai11
I think the problem was actually my free tier MongoDB Atlas cluster which only
allowed 500 connections at a time lol. Just upgraded it and I'm hoping it
helps these damn GraphQL queries

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gruez
The site really needs a loading indicator. I went to
[https://mydesktour.com/explore](https://mydesktour.com/explore), saw it was
blank, and thought it was because it was a brand new site with no UGC.

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guessmyname
They are fetching some data from a GraphQL server that takes several seconds
to download.

Unfortunately, the server appears to have a write timeout of 60 seconds so it
fails after one minute.

Here is an example of what is happening →
[https://i.imgur.com/BMsfLht.png](https://i.imgur.com/BMsfLht.png)

    
    
      POST /graphql HTTP/1.0
      Host: api-dot-yourdesk.wl.r.appspot.com
      Accept: */*
      Content-Type: application/json
      Origin: https://mydesktour.com
      Referer: https://mydesktour.com/explore
      User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_6) Safari/605.1.15
    
      {
        "operationName": "DesksByUser",
        "variables": {
          "filter": {}
        },
        "query": "query DesksByUser($filter: FilterFindManyDeskInput!) {\n  deskMany(filter: $filter) {\n    _id\n    date_created\n    img\n    about\n    name\n    hashtags\n    approved\n    likes\n    comments {\n      userId\n      __typename\n    }\n    user {\n      user_id\n      picture\n      name\n      __typename\n    }\n    desk_products {\n      pros\n      cons\n      coordX\n      coordY\n      product {\n        title\n        _id\n        image\n        prices {\n          raw\n          currency\n          value\n          __typename\n        }\n        __typename\n      }\n      __typename\n    }\n    __typename\n  }\n}\n"
      }

~~~
jonathancai11
Tysm for even looking into this! I really need to investigate the root
problems :(

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riffnote
I noticed there's no newsletter. Showing the desktop setting of the day would
be a quick low friction email I would enjoy getting in my inbox.

~~~
jonathancai11
Ah that’s a good idea! If I have time I’ll try to set that up

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stevenhubertron
The images didn’t load until I disabled my PiHole. Seems it’s relying on GTM
to load images. Just FYI

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nacs
Yeah broken for me too (pihole here). I'm guessing even if I turn off pihole,
google tag manager is going to get blocked by one of my adblocker extensions
also.

Lesson here: Write your JS so it doesn't break completely when things like
Google Analytics or Tag manager don't load/are blocked.

~~~
jonathancai11
Hm... If it's the desk images, they're being hosted on Cloudinary? Otherwise,
I didn't know that GTM could block that content from loading

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rcarmo
I usually just pop into r/battlestations when I feel like investigating new
desk setups. Be forewarned: it’s real easy to spend many a casual hour in
there.

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jonathancai11
For sure - was never into reddit but the community there is crazy

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rcarmo
Pro tip: do it on an iPad and just scroll through the pictures. Less
distraction, more visuals.

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a5withtrrs
I see a bunch of emails posted publicly in peoples submissions, not sure if
that's intentional or accidental but if possible, should be removed. :)

~~~
jonathancai11
Ah good point. Just pushed a fix Thanks for the feedback

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vmurthy
Seems to be up now (11/8 4:40 AM GMT). I am able to see the setups under
/explore and the charts although charts take up ~1s to load.

~~~
jonathancai11
Yep! The free tier Mongo cluster was the problem. Thanks for the feedback :)

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uptown
Nothing showing on iOS.

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jonathancai11
Apologies, but thanks for the feedback

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rawoke083600
I got one question (site looks good btw), which awesome white-speakers-on-wood
is in the last pic ?

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jonathancai11
Thanks, and I wish I knew haha I was searching for it myself

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eps
Explore link leads to an empty page.

Stats link leads to a page with partially initialized tables with no data in
them.

~~~
jonathancai11
Apologies, but thank you for the feedback

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dvt
I love this annotating idea on pictures. Solid work, and great presentation!

~~~
jonathancai11
Thanks!

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chad_strategic
I really like the idea of your website, the execution isn’t working... don’t u
love the web!

Hopefully u are collecting emails, so I can come back.

Regardless of execution, it’s a good idea so keep fighting!

~~~
jonathancai11
Tysm! Definitely learned a lot of hard lessons building this and failing in
public. Certainly will be a fight, but thanks again for the feedback

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jonathancai11
Hey everyone! Built a site for people to share their desk setups and optimize
their WFH experience. Posts, feedback, or bug reports are greatly appreciated!

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aciswhat
I just see a blank white page.

~~~
jonathancai11
Apologies :( but thanks for the feedback

