My dev.to contest experience — the takeaways
Making projects is fun. You know what is more fun? Winning a contest with one. My name is Himanshu, and I am an undergraduate based in New Delhi,India. I took part in the first ever contest organized by dev.to and I want to share what I learned from competing in this really cool contest. But first let me first introduce you to a couple of details about it.
dev.to + Pusher sweetness
As the title suggests, it was organized by dev.to, an awesome developer based community and sponsored by Pusher, providing a hassle free way to build real-time applications.
The constraints were pretty simple and straightforward. Make a creative real-time app that empowers Pusher tech. Here is why I think it was cool: it had no constraints on what type of platform to build for such as web-app, mobile app etc. No genre specified. Nothing else revealed. It was purely the imagination that mattered. Here is the original dev post reveal about the contest.
I also want to point out that the dev.to community and the people from Pusher were pretty helpful and informative. They literally were so excited about this contest( comment drilling ) that it got me going as well. I also watched Pusher tutorials here to get a gist how to integrate it into my project. They were open sourced 😍. And they were awesome too.
What I built
I am not going to waste much time getting into the specifics of how I made it (typing some keystrokes, that’s all) and the difficulties faced along the way. There is a dev.to post Livetable already dedicated to that. Its code is made open-sourced here. Contributions are always welcome. Though what I am going to say is I definitely had my share of takeaways from the contest. Here is the crux:
Be Stupid
This contest was stupid for me to participate in. First of all, it was open to all ages. That meant veteran programmers can come in and build the whole product I’ve built in a single day. But it takes stupidity to do something courageous. The worst that could have happened in this case is not still that bad. I would have lost but made a project from scratch. But I realised, if you are stupid, you tend to not give a f*ck and just do it. So be Stupid.
Participate
It’s literally the single thing that could help you improve in your domain. Take a bit of advice from what I told you before. Be Stupid. Because when you are stupid, you make stupid decisions. Like participating in a contest where you literally have a chance equal to you proposing to Jeniffer Lawrence someday.
Luck
There’s probably a million theories on luck at this point. But it just proved itself again. So after the contest got over, I was on the internship hunt. And one of the companies had given me an assignment as a final hurdle. Guess what, it was a chatting app with Pusher integration. Voila. I made it within an hour (styling took time 😡) without reading any documentation.
Note: There were 25 entries in the contest. I want to congratulate all of the contestants for making the effort to try and bring out something new to the table.
