node.js ko
Ryan McGrath
Kickass web developer/designer/author; hacker on various projects.
Creator of NKO 2010 innovation category runner-up: MapRejuice.
Votes (10)
I like it and it works well enough for its purposes. With that said, there are a great deal of modules that just wouldn't work in the browser, so I'm not sure how much further this could be taken without the somewhat large effort it would take to stub out a lot of methods, properties and even libraries.
The REPL itself, I should note, was a bit funky, but got the job done. All in all nice for 48 hours. As far as Node itself goes, this is useful, but I wouldn't really say it was innovative.
The video got me incredibly excited to try out the demo, but alas I was met with the following:
'An error has occurred: {"bytesParsed":0,"code":"HPE_INVALID_CONSTANT"'
I would love to look at it when it works - @ryanmcgrath on Twitter.
thattommyhall
contestantOops, dont know what happened there. Try now
This is a neat idea, however I get nothing but "internal server error"s when I try to use it. Doesn't feel terribly complete - the design is difficult to understand at a glance (took me a second before I could even find the login link), and trying to determine what's a chat versus what's a repository was done by looking at where they were linking.
Considering it's a chat around GitHub, I really feel like you could've opted for a design that fits more with their aesthetics, or something completely different. Stock Bootstrap just made it feel somewhere in the middle, and left me wondering what exactly it was trying to be.
It's fun for a minute or two, until you see that by going up you can pass through any blocks. I can't really see this getting a high score on innovation as it's not really pushing Node that far.
ricardobeat
contestantThanks for the vote. The current state of the game is pretty simple, but the world generation and simulation is running on node, things get pretty interesting when you have liquids, block physics, different environments and a thousand simultaneous players.
As a utility I'm sure it has its uses, but... this doesn't seem to do more than create a page that adds together things you'd be invoicing for. I can't really see this as being that innovative. The design works, but it took me more than a glance to figure out exactly what to do - the video was helpful in this regard.
I will say it's fairly complete, which is great given that it was 48 hours.
This idea is really cool, and I think it stands as an example of a fun way to show someone programming as a concept.
With that said, I'm somewhat confused on how one 'wins' a game. I crashed into a wall and it said "game over"; the example script included is fairly dense, and this is coming from someone who knows JavaScript fairly well.
Why does the player need to understand module.exports? It adds a needless layer to things. Requiring them to call setInterval multiple times also seems like a hack around just having an actual game loop that runs. These aren't things I'm docking in terms of rating for this entry, as something like a game loop especially might be a taller order for 48 hours, they're just questions I honestly wanted to ask.
Overall a solid entry, as far as this competition goes.
This sounds like a great concept, but it just didn't work on my end. Slew of socket.io 500 internal errors. :(
I think concept and design wise you guys have something solid, and had this worked I think it'd be one of the better entries. I like the way you guys put Node to work.
This is a fun game, but the controls feel somewhat sloppy. The animations and rendering in general are top notch, though, very impressive. Surprised there's no bounding box, seems like you could just push someone for ages.
I think the design is good - I like the color usage and it's pretty straight-forward, easy to jump in and understand.
As far as Node goes... I don't see how this really pushes things, and so I gave it a lower rating in terms of innovation. Most of this has been done to death - would've liked to at see this go beyond just a server ferrying and dispatching locations and scores.
I like the concept, and as far as the design goes it works with what you guys tried to do.
That said... perhaps I'm missing something, but this isn't really pushing Node much, if at all. Your use of newer browser features is fun, but I feel like it misses the point of this competition.
Would be interested to see what you guys could've done with this with a bit more time.
The app is... fairly broken, but I'm willing to shell out 3 stars for both utility and innovation. I could see this definitely being useful for some sysadmins, and as far as innovation goes distributed setups like this are particularly interesting use cases for Node.
Design and completeness get a 1 for obvious reasons relating to it... not working. :(