Story Time

All right. Welcome. This is storytime. I am John Graham-Cumming, Cloudflare's CTO. And normally on this show, I'd be interviewing Cloudflare engineers about how they solve some problem internally. But because of the pandemic, as you can see behind me, there is a lot of toilet paper, and there was a lot of toilet paper angst at the beginning of the pandemic, where everyone thought they were going to run out of toilet paper. And one person decided to do something about this. And that is Ben Sassoon, who is joining me on storytime. And he created a website called howmuchtoiletpaper.com. Ben, welcome. Thanks for joining me. Thank you very much for having me. So how much toilet paper? So what is this trying to solve this toilet paper website? Tell me about it. Yeah, sure. So it's kind of passed a bit now was a couple months ago, when it was all kicking off. But as I'm sure you will know, there was a bit of a toilet paper crisis around the world. And near me anyway, here in here in England, the shelves were empty, you couldn't buy toilet paper anywhere, because people were hoarding it and hoarding it and buying way more than they need. So we wanted to do something about it. And we figured perhaps educating people and how much toilet paper they actually need to use might help reduce this this hoarding and stockpiling. So we threw together how much toilet paper and about half an hour an hour, just really quickly, the first version kind of tells people if they've got enough to last their quarantine. And then from there, it grew and grew and grew. And so I've got a pack of 12 from Pingo Dose here in Portugal. So I can figure out with this website how long this will last me, right. So I'm actually going to bend down here, I'm going to do this. So I've got 12 rolls. How many toilet visits do I do per day? Well, average for a human is seven. Okay. How many wipes per trip? God, this is complicated. How do you get people to learn this stuff? All right, sheets per wipe. We have some default values for the people that don't want to go all the way into the advanced setting. I have no idea how many sheets there are on a Portuguese roll of toilet paper. I reckon it's about 160. It seems to be only in America that some of their rolls have like 1,000 sheets. I've got 69 days of toilet. Okay, I'm good then. I'm going to keep this. This is mine. This is mine, by the way. No one's going to get it off me. Go to Pingo Dose and get your own. Fantastic. So you saw this problem, you created this website. Was the domain actually available? It was. Yeah, I was very surprised. And people liked to kind of see which other domains are available. And people were buying up all the similar domain names. So it's a bit of a cat and mouse game as well. So when I buy one, someone will buy the other similar one or the plural. So I had to be a bit proactive about that. But yeah, the domain name was fully available. So are you saying there are rival toilet paper calculators out there? Yeah, it started to become a bit of a toilet paper Cold War. And people were copying the website. Some people were blatant enough to just copy the source code completely, just put it on their own server. So yeah, a bit of a game of cat and mouse. But I think we won in the end. You've won the toilet paper calculator wars. A battle that I never thought would actually have to be, you know, waged at all. But this thing went kind of crazy, right? It's not just you and friends looking at it. It grew enormously, right? Yeah, that's the thing. So at the start, me and my friend Sam, we were just having a chat about toilet paper and kind of how much we use individually. Because it's not something anyone ever talks about. Yeah, this whole thing. Yeah. Do you normally talk to your friend Sam about how much toilet paper you use? No, of course not. That'd be extremely strange. But this is the weird thing about the pandemic, isn't it? Where all these seemingly weird conversations we're having now, we couldn't even fathom having a few months ago. That's very true. Yeah, we were casually chatting about our toilet paper usage, and realised that there's quite a bit of variance there. And we use quite a bit of a different amount. And it kind of got us thinking like, perhaps this is why the crisis is happening. Because no one really understands the toilet paper needs of people. Because who wants to have a talk about this? It's taboo. It's a bit weird. So I threw together a really quick calculator. It looked even more basic than it does now. And kind of just threw it on GitHub pages and sent it to him. And like a couple of friends, just as a private joke, didn't think it would go anywhere else, really. But yeah, I guess they thought it was quite funny. And they sent it to their friends. And their friends sent it to their friends. And their friends sent it to their friends. And then before you know it, we've had 12 million people use the website, through the sheer power of the viral marketing of the Internet. So yeah, it's been quite a journey. And on GitHub pages, you had what? You had a static page and a few bits of JavaScript? Exactly. Yeah. Usually, I use GitHub pages for my small projects. So it's so easy to set up. And yeah, I just threw it on. It was like one index.html page at the time. Everything just in one file, really. And yeah, they allow like 100 gigabytes of bandwidth per month, which I'm never going to reach that. I'm only sending it to four friends. And then exploded. Yeah. Yeah. Look at some of these publications. I mean, obviously, news all over the US, obviously, toilet paper ran out in the US as well, and Australia as well, right? And I see here quotes from Jimmy Fallon, Trevor Noah. I mean, it was getting mentioned all over the place. It was one of the craziest weeks of my life. And yeah, we were doing radio shows as far as Australia, even. We were on a local radio station in Australia and Canada and everywhere. I never seemed to be off the phone doing interviews that week, which was very new to me as a computer science student at university. It's not really something that they train you for. But yeah, it was amazing. Yeah. And I see you've got a little potted history of toilet paper here. So tell us about this. It's a Chinese invention? Yeah, pretty much. We thought people might be interested to kind of hear where it came from and how it advanced over time. And perhaps the next time there's a toilet paper crisis that we're talking about how people stopped using toilet paper after the coronavirus and moved over to bidets or something like that. Yeah, toilet paper's got quite a cool history, actually, it seems so feel free to go to the website and have a read. I'm going to I'm going to read about it now. I live in Portugal where we have bidets everywhere because bidets are the law in Portugal. You can't install a toilet without installing a bidet. So everywhere you go, you get one. I think that's true in quite a few other bits of southern Europe. And I don't know whether that explains why there wasn't a toilet paper shortage here, because it really wasn't. It was a little bit or maybe the Portuguese were just like, well, we've probably got enough toilet paper, we'll be fine. But did this get used in countries all over the world? Yeah, I mean, predominantly, we were US. So a lot of people in the US and the UK, Australia, Canada, and Mexico, I think, as well. They were kind of our main places. So yeah, people with places with bidets where they're kind of the standard and like kind of central Europe area. Yeah, yeah, they didn't take an interest to as much. And I assume this is why because they didn't have this kind of problem there. But yeah, this meme kind of sums up if you're within Europe. Exactly. Depends which bit of Europe you're in. That's absolutely right. There's lots of bidets. Okay. So GitHub pages is great. I was reusing lots of stuff. But you end up with you said 100 gigabytes a month. Is that right? Yeah, they are you really generous, like 100 gigabytes per month bandwidth. It's great. Like who's ever going to reach that until you do when CNN post an article all about your site. And you get that more than that within a single day. So that's where the problems kind of start to come. I mean, overall, since we launched a couple months ago, our total bandwidth been like 730 or 50 gigabytes, which is way more than a free platform like GitHub usually happy with. And we had something like I think it's a 300 million requests in total. Wow. So what do you do that kind of situation where you tend to think like put it behind that? Yeah, it really, really helps. I mean, the cash for us, at least three 400 gigabytes worth of bandwidth. It's just fantastic. And GitHub, it meant they were happy about it the whole time. It got to the point where instead of sending me an email saying stop doing this, they were like, send us your address, we can send you some t shirts in the post. Yeah, no, obviously, we'd be happy to send you Cloudflare t shirts as well. So you're doing all of this on free free plan, a free Cloudflare plan and a free GitHub? Yeah, exactly. I think that's the amazing thing about the Internet now, which is that essentially most things you can just do for free. The tech has improved and so much competition between places that yeah, you can do almost anything for free. And that's great. Because it means like a student like me sitting in his bedroom with Coronavirus, not got much to do, can throw together something, put it online for free. And it can scale like crazy without having to really spend a lot of money on it, which I think is great. And I remember when I used to set up websites, like maybe 510 years ago, I don't remember this level of free services existing back then. And you kind of always had to pay on like shared hosting, and it would crash when you started to scale and things like that. But now it's really just so easy. You got things like Cloudflare, GitHub pages, Firebase, Netlify, all these free or very, very cheap platforms for you. And I mean, it sounds like the biggest expense you had here was probably the domain name. Yeah, I mean, in terms of hard cash, yeah, the domain name, we experimented and tried to get like some translations of the sites done for different markets didn't quite work out as well as we hoped. But yeah, the main expense is really time. The initial website was the building that the smallest amount of time I spent on the whole project. It's kind of answering phones all day, every day, speaking to the international media. It was crazy. My phone wouldn't stop ringing, which is strange for me because I hate talking on the phone. It's really not something I've ever been good at and find it very awkward. So yeah, that was what I had to learn really quickly had to deal with. And were you also getting questions from users with people saying, Hey, I've got an improvement for the website or something? Yeah, something I'm not really regretting. I had my email address at the bottom of the site in case anyone had any questions. And that very quickly turned into disaster. Because I don't know about you. But when I find a new website, the first thing I do is not email the creator about my toilet paper needs and desires. But apparently, a lot of people do. And we were getting hundreds and hundreds of emails every day from people all around the world. And mostly just complaining about things, to be honest, that they weren't happy with like the default values we had on the site, or that the maximum values on the sliders. So like the sheets on the role setting, for example, in advanced options. Yeah, that's currently set to 160. Because in the UK, that's an average amount for a role. And we had very, very angry people from the US email us say that their roles had 1000 sheets on 1500 sheets on they've got mega roles. Mega roles. Yeah, it's crazy. There's these brands that exist there, which like their main selling point is that they've got 1000s of sheets. And I've never come across this before. So that was, yeah, how do you keep that in your bathroom? I mean, I have a little toilet roll holder, you lonely, take a finger dose toilet roll, here they are. Yeah, I think they've got to have really, really thin pieces of toilet paper to kind of make that work. But we've got to accommodate for everyone, really. Yeah, and we have people emailing us. It was weird, actually, once we added the send to WhatsApp button at the top, but we have we have different share buttons, which really helped us go viral. And we had a one for WhatsApp, which is a very popular messaging platform here in the UK anyway. Yeah. And once we added that we got a lot of emails from like an older population of dare I say elderly people who really could not understand the website. I think maybe their family members have sent it to them to kind of see their opinion and they did not understand it. So instead of trying to figure it out, they would just scroll to the bottom, email me the amount of toilet rolls they have and ask me to calculate it for them. Which kind of defeats the purpose, but hey, hey. I don't know, maybe you could charge for that. I'll do the calculation for you, right? Now, the calculation here is pretty simple, isn't it? Because I sneaked into the website and did view source and I'm going to shame you by showing you your code. But this is it, right? This is the six lines of JavaScript that changed the toilet paper universe. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. So this is just a big multiplication and division. Pretty much. It's about as simple as it gets. But then again, you don't need to solve calculus to be able to calculate toilet paper usage. But yeah, it's very simple. But I think that was kind of what made us special because it was just such a simple interface, simple calculation, nothing really strange. I mean, a lot of people are trying to set ones up, ask you for like a hundred fields of data. It was really complicated. But I think, yeah, the simplicity of this, like what, five variables and then one sum to kind of make it work. Yeah, it's really quite cool. And yeah, as you say, six lines of JavaScript or so kind of changed my life, which is quite cool to say. Well, no, it's not. It's not surprising. You write the right six lines of code, then you can really, you can really make things work. And using free services, but coping with a huge amount of traffic. So I think you were saying, what was this? Over 700 gigabytes since it launched? Yeah, pretty much. And about 14 million page views. And the thing essentially is when you're talking about that number of gigabytes, this isn't a heavy graphical website with a ton of images on it. So that's, you know, 700 gigabytes of JavaScript and HTML primarily. Yeah, exactly. We did have a couple of GIFs on originally. I can't quite remember what they were doing, but I think that was taking a fair bit of bandwidth as well. But yeah, that's the thing. It's a very small website. So I'm very glad I didn't go like a clunky, heavy approach and just kind of hand code that. I had a lot of people ask me like, oh, did you use like static site generators, things like that? I was like, literally, I just wanted to send this to my friends and go to bed. And it was like, like literally just a couple of divs at the start and like a bootstrap container, I think. And then, yeah. And then I sent it off. And so, okay. So you did that and you literally write it and go to bed and send it to your friends. Did you then wake up the next morning to a tsunami of toilet roll questions or was it like a sort of slow buildup? It was actually surprisingly fast. One person posted it on a university Facebook group for like their uni. And that got like a thousand users on it and a thousand people used it. And I was like, I was like, correct. This is amazing. A thousand people have used this. This is unbelievable. And I couldn't believe it. And then the next day it was up to, I think like 15,000 people. I was like, this is blowing my mind. I've got to order some pizza to celebrate. This is incredible. And then it started jumping like crazy, like exponentially almost. And, um, with it by the next day, we had like a hundred thousand, which is blowing my mind. I was messaging everyone about it. It's crazy. A hundred thousand people. And then it started to reach the millions and it reached consistently like one, one and a half million people, um, every day for a good few days, which was just, it was just crazy. Well, this is how Facebook got started, right? It started at a university and was just for university students. So are you going to pivot this into the next massive social network somehow involved in it? Um, it's very possible. Um, I'm not sure how much people would be interested in that, but yeah, we can do. Yeah. Maybe perhaps we turn it into a cool, I don't know, toilet paper brand of some form, uh, to help you fill your toilet paper needs. I don't know. How much shampoo do I need? I mean, that's a good question. I've got all these questions now. Yeah, exactly. We can make a life planner. Yeah. Your email address is not still on the website, I assume. So I can't email you and ask you to make me a new, uh, a new, how much shampoo do I need? Yeah, no, I read my personal one, but, um, we put on contact at howmuchtoiletpaper.com and that way it's not in my personal inbox anymore, um, which is a lot more ideal. And what are you using for the backend for the email? Is that just a Gmail account or something? Like it's literally just a, an href link for the mail to at the beginning that goes straight to my email. Easy peasy. I just want to keep it as simple as possible. It's amazing. Um, yeah. Amazing how much free stuff. So on the, on the Cloudflare side, you primarily use the caching. Did you use any of our other services? Maybe the SSL I assume? Yeah, sure. So, um, yeah, we have, um, SSL on there as you can see from the lovely little padlock in the corner. Um, yeah, but caching was the main thing, especially when we reached like, like globally so much having that CDN available. Um, well I could really test it. I couldn't really go to other parts of the world, but I see that page loads are way faster than if I hadn't done that. And of course the caching saved me a lot. I mean, I've got written here, I think the total cash bandwidth was like 42%, um, which quite a significant chunk. And yeah, if we didn't have that caching, we would have gone over our monthly bandwidth within less than 24 hours. Yeah. I imagine you could even up that caching by using Cloudflare's page rules to tell it to cache every bit of JavaScript and every bit of HTML and all sorts of stuff. So yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, I was trying to make a lot of rapid changes. I was getting so many emails all the time from people, as I said earlier, so I wanted to kind of update it as I went along, which probably didn't really help the caching cause I had to kind of purge the cache so often. Yeah. But perhaps it would have been even better if I just left that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, don't worry about purging the cache. You wouldn't believe the rate at which people purge the cache in Cloudflare. It's pretty amazing. Just like if that, that is one of the services that if it slows down at all, our customer service department gets loads of calls. It's like, why can't I purge cache? I'm updating constantly my thing. And it's like, okay. And it's, it's purging cache in 200 cities around the world is actually kind of a fun problem to get right. So glad to use that functionality and it should, it should work pretty well. Did you look at using Cloudflare Workers and just moving all of this onto the edge and just saying, you know what? I won't even use GitHub. Yeah. It's the kind of thing where after I've made it, I then started looking into it properly and seeing like all the cool things that I could have done, you know, and it's a really easy situation to find yourself in where you make a project, you launch it. And then only after you've launched it, you realize, well, I could have done this in so many other ways. It probably could have been so much better. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if I was redesigning it today, perhaps I'll take that kind of approach. Again, at the time, put it up in half an hour, a couple of lines of CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and it was up. But yeah, I mean, definitely if I was to kind of redesign this again, and when the next pandemic comes along, I know I've got a whole arsenal of new solutions that I can try, which are a bit more exciting. You're going to try all this stuff out. It's going to be, it's going to be, it's going to be huge. It's going to be huge. But you did the important thing, right? Which is you actually shipped it. It's one thing to say, oh, there's all these technologies I could use and all this cool stuff I could do. But in fact, you just said, no, I'm actually going to ship it and it will be there. And so that's sort of the, that's job one is to get it out and then see what happens. Yeah, exactly. And it is a real problem. I mean, I'm as guilty as anyone. If I've got a new project idea I'm working on, I'll just sit and just read blogs and blogs and blogs about all the different approaches I could take or the different frameworks I could use. It's so easy to kind of get stuck in that spiral. But yeah, you're right. Sometimes simple's simple as best. Yeah. This is your greatest success online, is it? Yeah, it's quite shameful, isn't it? But I've said that earlier in my career. I have said that earlier in my career, so hopefully I'll be able to come up with something even better that probably reads a bit nicer on a resume. Yeah. Well, you know, I think you can put this on your resume. I mean, you, you shipped something and that's really the key thing, right? I mean, there's this lovely Steve Jobs quote, which is real artist ship. You know, it's just one thing to actually be like, I'm going to create this perfect thing. The other one is actually to get it out the door and get feedback. And it sounds like you've got feedback from a huge number of users. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So you're, you're a final year student. Is that right? Yeah. It's kind of a weird feeling. Officially I've finished my degree now. It doesn't really feel like it. And when I'll be graduating, I really, I really don't know. But it's been a really weird end to my university life, just sitting here in a room alone. I bet. But it is, it is what it is, I suppose. And yeah, although we can't really have all the celebrations we'd usually have. And our exams were moved online, which was even weirder. Yeah, still here, final year student. And the university were actually really helpful because annoyingly this website kind of blew up the week that my final dissertation was due in. So I was meant to be doing a lot of work that week. And then this kind of blew up and I was busy speaking on like CNN instead. So I was like, what do you do with that? So I got in contact with my university and they were really supportive and they put me in touch with their press officer and everything and like welfare officers. And they were like, look, we're happy to extend your dissertation deadline, but like a few weeks, you can kind of concentrate on this because they kind of realized perhaps it'd be good press for them as well. And things like this don't really come along that often. So yeah, they were very helpful with that and which kind of helped alleviate my mind a bit. Now I'm sure, I'm sure that they absolutely did realize this was great press for them, but it's great that they were also able to be flexible for you as well. So are you now, you know, bowled over with offers from the toilet paper industry to go work for them and I don't know, digitize the toilet paper industry or something? Yeah, I mean, we had some offers to buy the site from some toilet paper related companies. And my LinkedIn is just flooded nowadays with people who work at toilet paper factories. I don't know how this kind of happened, but there seems to be a lot of Chinese toilet paper factories where they seem to think I'm very interested in buying their toilet paper. And their suppliers are just messaging me constantly that price, the wholesale price for toilet paper through LinkedIn, which isn't something I'm particularly interested in buying. So if you're listening out there, toilet paper suppliers, I don't want to buy your toilet paper, but thank you very much for the offer anyway. Well, at least you could probably take a tour of a toilet paper factory. I think that's probably a must do. Yeah, the next time I'm in an area with a toilet paper factory, I'll be sure to knock on that door and say, it's me. Yeah. I'm Ben, you know, you know me from howmuchtoiletpaper.com. So, although maybe they're mad at you because they think that you've stopped people buying large amounts of toilet paper. It's true. Or perhaps I saved them countless nights of no sleep, but whilst they kept the production lines running. I prefer to think of it that way. So what's happening now with the site? Are people still going there and calculating things? Yeah, sure. So of course, it's not kind of as much as when toilet paper was the main focus, but yeah, we've still been getting quite a lot of people. Nowhere near as much as before, but quite a few people, which is nice. So yeah, we're kind of throwing around some new ideas now, how we can adjust it for the future, what we're going to kind of turn it into. Or if we're just going to keep it as a nice relic of the past and people can kind of come to here and reminisce with their grandchildren one day about what the toilet paper wars were like. What was it like? Yeah. Yeah, because I'm not sure anyone will believe them otherwise. I know. It's kind of crazy, isn't it, that that actually even happened and that shelves were empty of toilet paper. So it was an insane moment for everybody, especially when there was plenty of toilet paper. It was kind of surprising. So, you know, university's coming to an end. You did computer science. This is probably not a super computer science-y website, but nevertheless, it's real. What are you going to do next? You know, are you looking at jobs? Yeah, looking at jobs, which isn't really that easy in the current climate, but it is what it is. Yeah, I had a couple of exciting job offers, which I'm kind of pursuing, which would be nice. But on the other hand, this toilet paper site has kind of shown me a sense of entrepreneurship, almost. I kind of turned this small website into kind of eventually perhaps this massive thing could be equated to some kind of business almost. So yeah, I kind of want to carry on making projects and websites like this. So perhaps full-time employment won't really be what I'm hoping it will be, but I'm going to give it a try anyway and try to kind of keep doing this kind of thing on the side. I think that could be quite fun. I mean, I think it's kind of an inspirational story for all the people, including me, who buy domain names. One day saying, I bought this domain name, one day I'm going to do something with this domain name. And you actually did it and built this crazy website. Yeah, I mean, hoarding domain names, it's a real thing, isn't it? I mean, I do it too, and you can't help but do it. And then just sitting there doing it. It's a bit like video games as well. I buy so many video games through like Steam. I never really do anything with them. So perhaps I need to stop hoarding all these things and just start actually doing more. I don't know. If they provide you inspiration, then buy them. That's perhaps necessary for you to get inspiration. I know that I have a house full of books, some of which I've read. And so it's important that you get there. All right. Well, this is amazing. Tell me just a little bit about, so you use Cloudflare, you use GitHub Pages. What are the other free services online that you really love? Yeah, sure. So luckily, as a student, there's something called the GitHub Student Pack, which is a pack GitHub have put out with a collection of all different tools from different companies who have said, you know what, if you're a student, we'll waive our prices, you can have it for free, which is really, really cool. And it's something I'm definitely going to miss. When I was doing this site, actually, I use BrowserStack, which kind of lets you test your site on real devices like iPhones, different Android and Mac OS. And yeah, it kind of lets you boot up real devices all around the world in all different types, which is incredible because I don't have an iPhone. I want to see how this is rendering on an iPhone because it's a bit different to my Android. And yeah, I was able to go in straight away and just use it and see what it was like on a real iPhone, which is awesome. And yeah, you get a free plan with the GitHub Pack for that. And PolyPaint as well, which is a kind of similar thing, but for different sized desktop browsers, which is really great. A tool called Weglot, which provides, it's like one line of JavaScript, and it provides like translations based on geolocation for your site, which was useful for this because it meant I can have it translated different places. Yeah, there's so many great tools and Icons8, I think they're called, they're free icon licenses for students, which is where I got the toilet paper icon from. And yeah, all this great stuff. There's so many free tools out there. You just gotta be able to grab them. And the GitHub Student Pack is a really good place for that. Sorry to promote GitHub so much, but it's a great little thing. No, you absolutely should. I mean, I think GitHub is a great service. Obviously, Cloudflare uses it extensively for all of our open source stuff, and very important part of the whole ecosystem. And it's great. I didn't actually know about the GitHub Student Pack. I'm going to go and check that out. I mean, I'm not eligible anymore, but I'd like to know. Yeah, I mean, you can actually get free domain names through that. So essentially, if I had used that for my domain name, this whole project would have been zero cost, which is quite cool, considering that was my only real fixed cost, yeah. Giving the amazing amount of traffic you've had to handle with six lines of JavaScript. Yeah, it's pretty cool. All right. Well, Ben, listen, thank you for taking the time to chat with me. It's been great having you on Storytime. Thanks for building this with Cloudflare. I'm glad we managed to help you out. I think it really shows the power of the free plan on Cloudflare, which many people don't quite believe that we give you free bandwidth, but we do. And we're not going to try and charge you for this website. And a lot of stuff in the Cloudflare ecosystem is free like that, and it lets people get started. And we hope some of them start paying us in the future for some of the more advanced products we have in the suite. But this is brilliant. I love this. Apparently, now, if I had those really big American rolls, I'd have 643 days of toilet paper. I don't know where I should put that. Yeah. Well, listen, brilliant. Thank you so much for being on the show. It's been really great. And I'll be looking to see what you do next. Thank you. And thank you so much for having me. It's been really, really great experience. And thank you to Cloudflare for kind of supporting me through this. Oh, absolutely. We love it.