Mission: Hackathon Impossible?
Your mission, Coder, should you choose to accept it, is to partake in Mint Bean's Hackathon challenge. As always, should you or any of your fellow coders be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions. This disc will self-destruct in ten seconds. Good luck, Coder.
Mission Details:
Who: Work solo or in groups of 2 or 3.
What: Create any card game using cards from the standard 52-card deck.
Rules:
- Include a win and lose condition and a reset if applicable
- Accidental duplications of cards will be considered a bug
- Create a web application
- Backend can be any language
- Frontend must be in JavaScript or Typescript
- External APIs are permitted
- Submit your code, in order to be presented to a potential employer
- Deployment of your application is optional, but extremely recommended
When: Now! - Total time to complete is 6 days, 23 hours, 0 minutes. Time is ticking, why are you still reading!
Good Luck!
Six Necessary Tools for Survival:
1) Choose your team quickly and carefully:
You'll want to align with your teammates in a few key areas:
- Coding Languages
- Time Zones
- Availability
- Different strengthens and weakness
The more these aspects are aligned the easier your journey will be.
2) Game plan who will do what:
Based on strengths and time constraints, assign tasks appropriately.
Pro-Tip: Assign someone be the project manager, this ship needs to be led and too many coders at the helm will only cause this ship to spin in circles or worse yet someone yelling "Man Over Board!!
3) Over-communicate:
Share successes and challenges with one another. This is a team project and you need to make sure you aren't leaving anyone behind.
4) Be prepared to pivot if a team member falls off:
Working with strangers is a game of trust. While most people won't intentionally let you down after they have made a commitment, you may have to overcome those unplanned circumstances, like someone's "dog eating their homework".
5) Time is currency and you are spending it quickly:
To be sure you are on track to achieving the team goal, plan out each day and continually assess your progress.
Pro-Tip: If you think something will only take you blank amount of time, be sure to double it!!
6) Have fun!
How our Mission went?
Well..., we lived to tell about it. In my book that is a status of "Mission Successful"!
In the end, we decided to build a front-end standard Black Jack game that we rebranded 21 Mint Jack. As a team, we were able to work together successfully and overcome obstacles like power failures mere hours before the project was due. We maximized our time by taking on solo projects and making time to come together for some pair programming. During these sessions we had a chance to teach each other new tips and tricks that we will likely be able to use for about 3 more months before all the coding languages change again.
Like every project we wish we had more time so we could have implemented features like, the "split" logic, making our app responsive or using more realistic gambling chips.
Now....it's on to the next Hackathon Bond, I mean Mint Bean.
Links:
Try out our app here.
Review the code here.