Well that was unexpected

Thomas Millar / June 18, 2020

7 min read

Update: I gave a talk about Bill Clinton Swag, the video is linked below

This story starts back in college. I was a student at the University of Waterloo. I hated my statistics class and I was looking for an excuse to do anything other than learn the central limit theorem.

One night I was cooking dinner with my roommates and he mentioned that his little brother was tumblr famous. This was crazy to me. I had never met anyone remotely internet famous. We pulled up his tumblr blog, and scrolled a bit. Some great memes. Then there it was, Bill Clinton Swag.

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It was perfect. I had my excuse to ditch statistics. The photo was simple enough that I could probably code up some kind of photoshop style script and let users create their own image. I had been meaning to learn Ruby on Rails anyways.

I spent two days going through some tutorials, scraped together some code from stackoverflow, learned the math behind perspective transforms, bought the domain and we were live.

The original
The original https://billclintonswag.com

I posted the site on reddit, pulled open the realtime Google Analytics dashboard and waited. A few people clicked on the link and made it to the site. Though people were bouncing off the home page very quickly. I live coded some tweaks, added some labels, and tried to steer people towards the search bar. Finally when I added the explicit steps, people started to make their way through to flow and generated their own "swags".

I sat around for a few hours, watched the traffic. It wasn't anything too spectacular - a thousand page views or so. It was 2011, and I was 18 years old and this was the first thing I had put on the internet. I was thrilled! I logged off, went to bed.

A few days passed. I periodically checked the analytics. Back to that statistics class.

It was a few years before I thought about Bill Clinton Swag again. I was doing an internship in New York, and my sisters were down to visit. We were grabbing a slice and my sister asked me about it. I had forgotten about the site, but was still paying for the hosting. I pulled up the analytics.

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Apparently I had gone viral in Brazil at some point along the way.

Fast forward a few years

It's late 2019, I have a job. I'm sitting around looking for a side project to work on. I'm still paying for Bill Clinton Swag. Occasionally people tweet me that it's broken. I'll log onto the server, tweak some things, restart the app server, whatever needs to be done. I'm coming up dry on new ideas, so I figure I'll give Bill Clinton Swag some love.

I throw out the code and start fresh. The site will still be as simple as the original, but it'll be mobile friendly. Also I'll use the latest CSS 3dmatrix transform trickery to give you the ability to preview the final swag before it's rendered. Few weeks later, an hour here and there, and I have it done. The site is back online.

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I go through Twitter and reply to those year old tweets saying the site is back online. I don't bother posting it to Reddit. I didn't really build it to get more attention, I just wanted it back up and running. For the people that continued to stumble upon it, they can enjoy.

This time around however, I remember to check the analytics more frequently.

It was April. The middle of the pandemic. It started happening again. This time, however, it wasn't Brazil. It was Poland.

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This was way more traffic than last time! In one week I had surpassed the total traffic the site had seen since it was first created in 2011.

That's when the tweets started rolling in. I had linked my Twitter handle at the bottom of the page and people started tweeting me with bugs. Apparently I had hit my API rate limit on the Last.FM API I was using to search for the album artwork.

I was scrambling to think up a way to fix the problem. I was clearly way above my rate limits on the API. The best thing I could think of on the spot was to create 4 more developer accounts with Last.FM, randomize which key I used on page load, and hope the traffic levels out. Totally not a chill thing to do, but it was the best I could think of. I wanted to ride the wave.

That's when someone in the UK decided to make it an Instagram challenge.

Within a span of 48 hours. The site went from 600 concurrent users to 50k concurrent users. There aren't enough fake email addresses in the world that would give me the number of developer keys that I needed to support that kind of traffic.

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I had to come up with a better idea to get around the rate limiting. That's when I realized Last.FM had a search page on their website. You can visit,


You will see a webpage with the search results. Well... I figured they are probably not going to rate limit their own site right? Besides, the search API was running in a lambda function deployed into every AWS region using Vercel. That would probably be pretty difficult to IP block.

So I changed the code in the lambda to download the HTML of that web page, parse it, then return the results as JSON. It wasn't fast, but it worked. Users were happy.

Vercel came calling

It was around now that my hosting company Vercel sent me an email. At the time I was still on a free hobby plan and I was generating more traffic than some of their biggest customers. They were happy for my success, but given I wasn't paying for any of the bandwidth, they asked if I could drop their logo on the site. Totally reasonable, happy to oblige. I just wanted to ride the wave.

Then, more disaster. I started hitting a different kind of API rate limit. It wasn't the Last.FM rate limit. I had already solved that. Instead I was hitting an internal AWS Lambda rate limit for the maximum concurrency a lambda can run. I hit the rate limit of the AWS product that is known for it's infinite scaling!

This is when the folks at Vercel jumped in to save the day. Joe Haddad walked me through how to better use their built-in CDN to try to get more cache hits on the lambda function instead of invoking it for every search query. The theory was that most people are searching for top-40 music so there will probably be a decent cache hit rate limiting the number of times the lambda was invoked. It worked beautifully.

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Last.FM came calling

Things were kind of working. There were some API errors here and there, people were complaining that they couldn't find the album they wanted. Nothing too bad. That's when I opened Twitter and saw this.

This is when my stomach dropped. Ben is a lead developer at Last.FM and I had spent the last few days trying to circumvent their fair use limits. I thought to myself "Party's over, time to shut this thing down".

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Luckily, when I DM'd him, he was actually super supportive. He congratulated my on the success, but mentioned that if it went on for too much longer he was going to have to pull access from remote embedding of their album artwork images.

Apparently I was generating 5 times the amount of traffic to their CDN than their own users!

I looked through the code, realized the were using Fastly for their image CDN. I read through the fastly docs, and found out a way to reduce the image size that I was downloading a bunch. I pushed a new version of the site and Ben was happy.

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A week glued to Twitter and Google Analytics, fixing bugs, I was ready to take a break. It was time to put away VIM and just scroll through Instagram and see what people were saying.

Memorable Posts

The sad part of trying to keep this thing up and running for the entire week, I wasn't really able to enjoy the moment. I got some time and started scrolling through some of the posts and found that people were starting to recreate the image with their own record collections.

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Even LL Cool J made a Bill Clinton Swag.

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I guess I really knew that the website made it when bloggers started writing opinion pieces about how the meme was "problematic". Nice take Anna.

It also got written up in Oprah Magazine. That was kinda cool.

I got interviewed by Crack Magazine.


Well it was a fun 15 minute. I really want to thank the folks at Vercel and Last.FM for bankrolling the meme. You didn't ask to, but it was very generous that you didn't shut me down. I appreciate that.

If you're an engineer and want the tldr to make something scale. Put it on Vercel, make the website static, cache as many API endpoints as possible. Watch your metrics, there's always another optimization.

If you want to learn more, hit me up on Twitter with questions and I can go into any of the details.