So I built a Kahoot style web app, but with coding minigames...

Greetings, everyone!

In this post, I want to share with you all a brief story of how I came about building an amazing web app which I will share with you all the link to it below to try it.

Backstory

If you been kept up-to-date on dev.to then you would have been informed of the Redis hackathon which was announced about a month ago, and that just happened to come to a closing as of Monday 29th August this week.

For my project submission, after an intense brainstorming session, I went on with the idea to build a web app that allows users who are familiar with JavaScript to play a series of minigames to compete against with each other to come out as the winner. Surprisingly enough, it didn't take long for me to also come up with a good name for this project - I just called it 'JSMiniGames' - which was probably the most fitting and best name I could possible came up for this project.

Keep in mind, during this time I wasn't sure about whether I actually could build such a web app. I checked out some other web apps that somewhat emulated the idea I wanted to project, such as 'CSSBattle' and 'Codebattle', but they did not encapsulate exactly what I had visioned. I personally thought that I could build something a lot more innovative and creative than those respective web apps by adding an element of "actual" fun which I thought was missing in those web apps.

Therefore, my main goal of this web app was to make learning programming fun and engaging - almost like a videogame.

I realized then that this web app may potentially be the first of this kind - this really excited me.

A Shift Of Direction

Initially, I had wanted to submit my project for this hackathon, but during the last weeks of building my project - I had decided - that I didn't want to. Some of those reasons were that I didn't think my submission would make in the top 25 which was required to get a prize. To be honest, I had only participated in this hackathon with the hopes of actually making in that bracket. However, that wasn't the main reason.

If you have heard of the book 'Can't Hurt Me' written by David Goggins then you may have not known that his book was published on his sole behalf and not distributed on behalf of any other book publisher. The reason for this, he said on the JRE podcast, was that he prized his book as something like a trophy and he took real pride in that, and so therefore he wouldn't take any deals from book publishers to publish his most prized possession.

When the submission date was coming to a close, I had reflected on that and the decision whether to submit it or not became clear to me. Looking back at the past 3 weeks of my sheer investment to make this idea come to a reality - I choose the later in the end. I didn't want this project to something like a "one-off" thing that would never be re-visited again. I really believed this project has the potential to be something more given enough time and effort.

What's Next

If you read everything up till now, I want to express my gratitude to you :¬)

I'm inviting the community of dev.to to be the first ones to try out the beta of JSMG.

The link to the live demo of the project is here

I'm planning to make improvements to this project where possible and add suggested changes from feedback received from users of the web app. I also plan to make this project open-source in installments with the client side of the app being the first - server side is a bit complicated.

If you want to support the project in other way, contact me via t.uddin9121@gmail.com

Thank you to everyone who has stopped by to try out my web app - I appreciate all the support!