Pascal

In 2015 I slept outside for 4 days to cop one of the 7 pairs of Pirate Blacks in Switzerland. In 2023 I built the systems and launched them globally. Truly full circle, I would have never thought.

The past 3 days have been so unbelievably crazy, need time to processes.

Sneaker bot developer hiring funnel is unbeaten

Seeing a lot of cool engineering stories from bot developers, so I want to share a cool innovation from Sneakercopter I think about a lot which revolves around handling of the Queue.

In 2018/2019 Mesh used to always drop their limited sneakers on the app. This meant they always had to try and hide their HAWK hashing secret key somewhere in the app, but that was basically impossible for them to do as if it's signing requests - an android debugger will find it.

They then switched to web releases directly on their website, powered by a Queue-It based "waiting room" style mechanism where users had to wait in a waiting page before being able to access any of the website. Like many others, this was powered by a cookie that needed to be issued if you'd been given permission. No cookie, no entry. This meant I had to build a Queue style handling mechanism similar to some of the other waiting room bots.

In doing so, I noticed two key characteristics of the cookie that was populated when you were allowed to go through the page:

1. It had an expiry, but the expiry would refresh on every new interaction you did with the website.
2. The cookie was not locked to an IP address.

Those two findings were actually super important, especially when realising that what point 1 was actually doing was issuing you a *new* cookie with a new expiry date, and not expiring the old cookie. This means that in theory, you would only need to have one valid cookie in order to generate many more (simply by visiting new pages). Then, those cookies could be used by anyone for their TTL.

With this in mind I fundamentally rebuilt Sneakercopter to actually be a large distributed system with only one mission in mind - get one instance through the queue at least one time and then announce the cookie to all other instances. This means that every Sneakercopter instance was actually connected with a TCP socket server reporting it's progress in the queue to see if it was selected to go through the queue.

Once somebody was selected to get through the queue, that user's instance of Sneakercopter actually sent the cookie that they got in order to enter the website to the TCP server, and that server would announce and distribute that cookie to every single other user of Sneakercopter instantly - allowing everybody to make it through the queue and create their own queue access cookie that they could use to check out.

This architecture powered probably the most successful period of Sneakercopter when it came to frontend web checkouts, and the beauty of it is that it was an edge that was only possible with scale. You had to get through the queue normally at least once to use it. We had a large user base of people running the bot that all were working together to make it past the queue. So a single person making a script would not be able to use the same approach as our full user base was actually helping each other succeed.

This was patched a long time ago of course, but it always stuck with me as an innovation i'm most proud of, but also as a lesson I took with me when I went on to build the mechanics to protect major sneaker launches. Details matter and they can have compounding effects when a creative mind tries to bend the rules - always when building a mechanic I thought "how can I break this?"!

As standard, these solutions were implemented and thought of in the middle of the night before a drop 😃

I used to use that’s kinds of photos and videos of 100s of sneaker deliveries in my presentations about bot management at adidas to show how serious sneaker Twitter people were

Sneaker Twitter still shaped much of what I do today. Nothing ever compares to running a company to find edges as a teenager with hungry customers. Corporate pressure and work ethic is easy after that, I promise one day to tell some stories from the other side 🫡 proud of you all