FreeCodeCamp with Netlify

The weekend of November 3rd and 4th I had the opportunity to help facilitate the two day FreeCodeCamp JAMStack Hackathon event, with prizes given by sponsors like Fauna and Formspree, as well as overall prizes and live coverage on a livestream interview from Github’s video studio.

You can see my initial presentation on the livestream archive here, if you want to join in, the instructions are just a few steps long in this README.

Many of the onsite teams succeeded with Fauna, and a handful of the remote teams as well. One lesson we learned is to have a stronger online support presence for remote attendees of events like this in the future. That said, we got some great remote submissions. Check out this video of the FriendsOverJAM app:

There were 28 onsite teams, of which 14 reported using Fauna. Of those, about half built applications that made serious use of the database. After looking through everyone’s code, we awarded prizes to three teams, based on having the most interesting queries:

Caption This

You can add captions to animated GIFs and the best captions are upvoted. Code for the Netlify functions based implementation is on Github.

SmarTea Pants

Jeopardy study app, code is here.

Face to Face

You can find the code for this app here.

Nu-rd

This uses Fauna queries to index math word problems by the relevant operators, so that numeric questions can be used to look up related word problems.

Conclusion

It was thrilling to see how skilled the recent code school graduates are. The contestants all demonstrated an ability to cut through configuration errors etc, and create features that matter, as fast as possible. There was also an emphasis on user stories and planning, that gave these applications a completeness I hadn’t expected.

Here are the winners from Caption This preparing for the interview in the Github video room.

If you want to join in yourself, the instructions are just a few steps long in this README, and will automatically provision a Fauna connection for you, so you'll be up and running even faster than in the video at the top of this blog.