Simon Willison’s Weblog

7th December 2024 - Link Blog

Writing down (and searching through) every UUID (via) Nolen Royalty built everyuuid.com, and this write-up of how he built it is utterly delightful.

First challenge: infinite scroll.

Browsers do not want to render a window that is over a trillion trillion pixels high, so I needed to handle scrolling and rendering on my own.

That means implementing hot keys and mouse wheel support and custom scroll bars with animation... mostly implemented with the help of Claude.

The really fun stuff is how Nolen implemented custom ordering - because "Scrolling through a list of UUIDs should be exciting!", but "it’d be disappointing if you scrolled through every UUID and realized that you hadn’t seen one. And it’d be very hard to show someone a UUID that you found if you couldn’t scroll back to the same spot to find it."

And if that wasn't enough... full text search! How can you efficiently search (or at least pseudo-search) for text across 5.3 septillion values? The trick there turned out to be generating a bunch of valid UUIDv4s containing the requested string and then picking the one closest to the current position on the page.