Welcome to the first-ever DEV contest! Organizing an event like this is something we’ve been wanting to do for a while and we’re super excited to be teaming up with Pusher, our first platinum sponsor. They’ve been wonderful partners so far. In fact, we use the Pusher Channels API to support the dev.to live chat (if you’ve been to one of our workshops, you’ll know what I mean). They truly make the process of building real-time apps seamless and we’re excited to see what you can do with their technology.
The theme of this contest is to create a real-time app or a hack that uses Pusher Channels real-time API. To get started developing apps with Pusher Channels, you can check out the tutorials section on Pusher.com. We’re not looking for super polished/scalable/backwards-compatible submissions but we are looking for projects that work. Judging will be based on how innovative/fun/clever/useful your idea is and how well you’ve executed said idea. Bonus points for documentation in the form of dev.to posts 😛
There will be two grand prize winners -- the community grand prize winner and the panel grand prize winner. The community grand prize winner will be selected based on the community’s reaction, (highest number of hearts and unicorns ❤️ 🦄) and the panel grand prize winner will be selected by the DEV and Pusher teams. We’ll also be giving away prizes to ten runner-ups.
How to submit a project 📨
All projects need to be submitted to dev.to by May, 25, 2018 at 11:59 pm EDT. You can submit your project by creating a submission post -- please use this template. In the post, you will include:
- Link to live project demo
- Link to code
- Description of how you built the project
- Links to additional posts you may have written along the way to document your progress
How to vote for your favorite project ⭐️
Even if you don’t submit a project, we hope you check out all the cool things the community is building and vote on your favorite! Your vote has a direct impact on who receives the community grand prize.
Prizing 🎁
Community Grand Prize (1)
- $1000 towards any Udacity nanodegree program
- $500 gift card to Adafruit
- $400 for an annual Safari Books Online membership
- $250 Coupon to the DEV Shop
- Pusher Swag
- A DEV Badge 😉
Panel Grand Prize (1)
- $500 towards any Udacity nanodegree program
- $500 gift card to Adafruit
- $250 Coupon to the DEV Shop
- Pusher Swag
- A DEV Badge 😉
Runner-Up Prize (10)
Important Dates 🗓
05/01: Start Hacking!
05/25: Submit your project by 12pm EST
05/31: Winners announced!
Top comments (79)
I think this is a great way to build a portfolio. Winners and runner-ups will all get ample recognition for their efforts.
I'll plan to make some threads where folks can chat through some ideas or get feedback. Look out for that in the coming days/weeks.
Otherwise happy to talk more about this here. We're building internally with the Pusher API and will be releasing details on that but I also plan to hack together something fun for the contest. I won't be eligible for the prize though 😄
To clarify for the pedantics like myself, we're talking about using the Pusher APIs and not any specific dev.to endpoints correct? Or are those available for use in the contest and I'm just behind on how fast everything is growing here?
Yeah - the idea is to build something with Pusher Channels. You'd control both the server and client components.
I don't know whether DEV.to expose any of their endpoints.
Awesome! If we submit mobile applications, should it be a video of the app working as the demo?
You have freedom in terms of how you present the idea, but anything to best demonstrate it is a good idea. Videos, gifs, embeds, anything you can to show the submission in all its splendor.
Hello everyone 👋 I'm a developer evangelist at Pusher.
I'm super proud to work with the DEV team on this, and eager to see what cool stuff you folks build this month!
I'm also available to answer any Pusher Channels related questions (and help out with any other questions where I can). Either tweet me @zmarkan me or email me at zan [at] pusher.com :)
Happy building!
Can we use any Pusher products for the app we build? For instance, I'm interested in the Textsync API. It is realtime and a Pusher product
The requirement is that you use Channels, but you can of course use any other products as well 😉
Is the application state strongly consistent?
Sounds cool.
So the constraints are using the channels API and not the chat/editor stuff.
And iff I got this correctly after reading the docs, the constraints of this API are:
10 connections * 1 msg published == 10 msg deliveredCorrect - for the submissions to qualify the projects need to use Channels.
Of course, you are free to use any other APIs or services as well - and that includes Pusher products :)
And regarding the limits in the free/sandbox tier:
the limit is 100 concurrent connections. You can have more users, but not connected at the same time. You can find more info here: support.pusher.com/hc/en-us/articl...
message counts are as Peter Mbanugo described, you can read more about it here: support.pusher.com/hc/en-us/articl...
The rest is correct
I believe the 100 connections is specifically for the presence channels. I don't think that's a constraint on other uses of the product. But we'll get more of the Pusher folks in here to clarify anything.
I think 10 connections * 1 message = 11 messages in total
Ah, right.
Challenge accepted ;)
Good luck!
🙌🙌🙌
This is amazing.I'm up for the contest 🙌
Whoo! Any idea of what you'll be building?!
Right now, I don't have any idea about the thing I'm going to build.But first thing I'll do is to understand the working of pusher 😁 .
Excellent! 🚀
Feel free to ping me if you'd like me to clarify anything, and I invite you to check out our tutorials page for the inspiration.
Thanks! :-)
Oh my god, this is amazing!!
Yay!
How is pusher better than socket.io ?
Hey, I'm a developer evangelist at Pusher.
I don't see it as a better/worse kind of deal.
Both Pusher Channels and socket.io allow you to publish and subscribe to messages in realtime using the WebSocket protocol.
The main difference is that Channels is a hosted service/API, and with socket.io you need to manage the deployment yourself.
In general, you need to do less work to get started with Channels, and once it comes to scaling that really becomes a LOT less work :)
The use-cases of Channels are also a bit more narrow.
It seems to me that the main idea behind channels is, that you publish changes from the server to the client.
For example, I change a blog-post and people on dev.to get notified that there was an update to that post.
While socket.io lets you publish events from the clients, that go over your server logic to other clients.
While that's true for Public channels (the simplest use-case) - the Channels API supports client events too - using either Private or Presence channels.
pusher.com/docs/client_api_guide/c...
The tl;dr; version is:
But can I control the client events on my server somehow?
For example, if I want to create a game, I need pipe the client events through some server side logic.
You could do that using WebHooks, they allow you to capture all client events on the server - pusher.com/docs/webhooks#client_ev...
Alternatively you could create an API through which the clients would communicate, and the server would broadcast the events.
It really depends on your particular use-case, what kind of events will your clients be creating, and what makes the most sense for it.
Webhooks wouldn't for instance allow you to block client events, only observe them.
How easy would it be to move from socket.io to pusher and vice-versa?
As the core concepts of subscriptions, channels, and events are quite similar, it should be a fairly quick migration - but of course it all depends on your concrete project and implementation.
Is there a way to close user connections on the server?
I'll double check but I don't think so.
You could send a message to a particular user that you wish to disconnect and handle that clientside.
What is your use-case for this?
I want to use presence channels for games. When a game is finished, the users should be removed from the channel.
Ah yeah - just send a message that tells the clients to unsub from the channel, that should be the best way.
I've asked the team working on Channels and we don't support terminating connections from the server.
Well, guess for this contest it should be enough, thank you.
I'm curious to compare the two, also!
Hey, I've answered it above: dev.to/zmarkan/comment/37jf
Oooohhh, now to come up with an idea... 🤔
The hardest part 😉
Seems quite interesting. I'll definitely be submitting something!
🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
Awesome