The Popcat meme has been rising in international fame recently thanks to its addictive nature. The meme can be found on a website that tracks the amount of clicks/taps that’s being made in respective countries and regions.
Have you ever wondered who is behind such an ordinary but ingenious invention? Let’s introduce to you three guys responsible for it all – Josh, Ed and Freddy.
Joshua O’Sullivan
According to his LinkedIn page, Joshua graduated from the University of Sheffield with a first class degree in Computer Science and is a full-time software engineer.
There is little information available on his website, other than that the fact that he’s a “humble genius and photographer who enjoys tea and cats”.
Under his “Programming” portfolio, he described Popcat as:
A Vue app based entirely on the popcat meme, with a Golang backend utilising a Postgres db & the Twitter API.“
Edward Halis
If Joshua’s profile yielded little information about the renowned meme, Edward beats him in that aspect. If you were to click on his website, this is the only sentence you’ll see:
A competitive clicker game.”
He also shared how he went to the same university as Josh and identifies as an avid tea drinker. There’s little doubt over Edward’s love for the beverage, as he succintly summed it up in his LinkedIn page: “Find me somewhere between the kettle, teabags and milk.”
On Edward’s Twitter account, he joked about how sacrifices were necessary due to overwhelming traffic from the Popcat meme.
Freddy Heppell
Currently a full-stack web developer, Freddy’s website features a collection of his work where Popcat is introduced as a “webgame based upon a meme”.
However, little did he expect that his so-called “dumb side project” would achieve overnight fame, as expressed in this Tweet.
Malaysia now #2 in Asia
As of today, a total of 187 countries and regions have participated in the game, with Taiwan claiming the champion spot with a staggering accumulated clicks of 6.7 billion.
A quick search on Twitter also revealed the secret behind Taiwan’s smashing success.
As for Malaysia, it is currently ranked 10th worldwide with around 871 million clicks and 2nd in Asia.
Cover Images via Josh, Ed and Freddy
Author: Raymond Chen
Proofreader: Sarah Yeoh
