Writing down (and searching through) every UUID

https://eieio.games/blog/writing-down-every-uuid/

I think the site is great. I can quickly find my favorite UUIDs and star them or browse them all to find one that’s just right.

But having 5,316,911,983,139,663,491,615,228,241,121,378,304 2 possible values made it way harder than it needed to be to write them all down. I’m not sure why the authors of the UUID spec wanted to include so many bits!

So I think the final implementation here is pretty interesting. Let me tell you about it.

This problem had a few major challenges:

• 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 3
• I didn’t want to generate UUIDs in order from first to last. We all know the good UUIDs are in the middle! So I needed a way to generate UUIDs that ensured that I generated them all once.
• Since I was handling scrolling and rendering on my own, ctrl-f didn’t really work for search. I wanted to search through every UUID, not just the ones I could see! So I had to implement that too.