I started working on this side project, pinging.net, in 2019 when we had a bad router that was causing internet issues on my spouse's phone. Downloading an app to run ping isn't fun and I thought it would be cool to be able to quickly "run ping" in the browser. I have worked on it off and on since then, mostly motivated when I would run into yet another internet issue (e.g. Zoom calls over Airbnb WiFi while traveling). Last week, we had yet another an internet issue where every 140 seconds our connections were getting reset. This was very apparent on the graph of pinging.net. That motivated me to get this project to the finish line and launch it more broadly (power cycling the modem fixed the internet issue by the way).

My career up until a few months ago was writing proprietary financial trading systems, which normally do not need to run 24/7. I enjoyed learning more and thinking about high availability working on this project. It was also nice to play with webdev again. Since I am using WebRTC I am experimenting with not using a reverse proxy and doing everything inside the HTTP binary. Not routing through something like NGINX might bite me but I want to see how far I can go with it.

About page: https://www.pinging.net/about

GitHub page: https://github.com/benhansenslc/pinging