Last year I “wondered if MVC was even the best design for a chess game,” but if I had taken the time to read about the Universal Chess Interface (UCI) I would have seen that MVC is a common design for online chess. If I had built to UCI specs and selected a full-stack framework instead of trying to write backend from the ground up in Node, I might not have given up and resorted to just writing frontend for a platform service.

Sure, online chess is a solved problem, but I was reinventing the wheel for learning’s sake.