SquiggleSync is a real-time collaborative whiteboard application built with Angular, Node.js, Redis, and WebSockets. It lets multiple users doodle together on a shared canvas, with strokes synchronized live across every connected client. Think of it as a stripped-down, learning-focused take on tools like Excalibur or Miro — but the value here isn't the product, it's the architecture.

What makes this repo a hidden gem is that it tackles a genuinely hard distributed-systems problem in a small, readable codebase. Real-time collaborative drawing forces you to confront:

• Concurrency control — what happens when two users draw at the same coordinate simultaneously?
• State synchronization — how do late-joiners get the current canvas state without replaying every event?
• Event-driven design — how do you fan out stroke events to N clients efficiently via WebSockets?
• Redis pub/sub — how do you scale beyond a single Node process?

Most tutorials hand-wave these problems. By exposing them in a small codebase, SquiggleSync becomes a useful study artifact. The Angular frontend is also a refreshing change of pace from the React-saturated real-time-app tutorial space.

Who might find it useful:

• Angular developers who want a non-trivial WebSocket reference project
• Backend engineers learning Redis pub/sub patterns for horizontal scaling
• Students building a portfolio piece that demonstrates more than CRUD
• Anyone curious how collaborative tools actually keep state in sync under the hood

It's not production-grade — there's no CRDT, no operational transform, no auth — but as a focused exploration of event-driven real-time architecture, it punches above its zero-star weight.