Yes, I made it. The primary goal was to learn how to make a real-site that can also scale. Yes, there were a few interesting problems, especially how to make it support a large load; the solution has been to use socket.io and Redis. I'm thinking about writing a blog post about it. I'm validating all usernames, for now I don't have problems caused by ASCII characters. For now the website is supporting well the loads. client and server communicate via websockets (using socket.io), and this drastically reduce requests. Moreover, I'm using NGINX as a load balancer to further improved the load support.