2026Design & engineeringLive
Vexio
A real-time collaborative whiteboard — draw together, see each other's cursors, and pick up after a dropped connection.
Overview
Vexio is a shared whiteboard where several people draw on one canvas at once. Shapes, pen strokes, text, and sticky notes sync live, along with every collaborator's cursor and selection, so a room behaves like a single surface rather than a set of drifting copies.
It runs as three deployable apps: a Next.js client with a custom HTML Canvas renderer, an Express REST API for auth and room management, and a raw WebSocket server that holds live room state in memory and writes debounced snapshots to PostgreSQL through Prisma.
Highlights
- Ten drawing element types with live cursors, selections, undo/redo, and admin/editor/viewer roles enforced on the server.
- Drag updates throttled to ~30/sec and snapshots debounced to 1.5s, collapsing hundreds of writes per drag into one.
- Survives dropped connections with exponential backoff and a 500-operation offline queue that replays on reconnect.