Last weekend, I was lucky enough to be able to participate in the first Node Knockout. The rules are simple: you have 48 hours to code someone amazing using the Node.js platform. Planning ahead is allowed, however it has to be all on paper (no digital assets, designs, etc)
I’m not sure what it is about these weekend coding competitions, but they’ve always fascinated me. I love seeing real life demonstrations of the fact that technology has progressed to the point where you can go from a harebrained idea to deployed and functional product in a few intense dev days. Or maybe it’s because I remember my previous life as an ASP.NET developer where the first week of a project would barely cover the schema design and data access layer. Either way, it’s great for the Node.js community. If you want to convince the world that a language/framework is worth using, the best way is use it to build amazing stuff, amazingly fast.
Having also competed as a solo team in Rails Rumble the last few rounds with decent results, I had a good idea of what to expect. This time I was able to team up with some really talented local developers I met at MongoSeattle a few months ago: Grant Goodale, Damon Cortesi, and Aviel Ginzburg. I figured with a team of 4, we could really bite off something ambitious and might have a chance at actually completing it.
