Warning! This project was made for educational purposes. Now in beta
Idea
Two players agree upon a list of 16 tasks, which forms a 'pack'. Once a pack is set, the game commences. Players input the tasks they've completed, and these populate a 4x4 field.
But here's the twist: tasks are scattered randomly across the field, introducing a delightful element of luck. The objective? Secure as many '4 in a row' combinations as possible.
the odds are always in your favour
The Story
In the throes of Covid lockdowns, when days melded into nights, my productivity levels were so low, they would make a sloth look like an overachiever. But then, amidst the haze of takeout containers and unwashed laundry, the concept of Task Bingo took its first breath.
Frankly, our initial version wasn't winning any beauty contests. It was a scrappy mess hastily pieced together. The graphics? Primitive. The UX? Don’t even ask. But it worked, and that's what mattered.
As quarantine faded, our lives began to resume some semblance of normality. Energized, productive, and even a tad athletic, we drifted away from our creation. The Task Bingo files were cast aside, lost in the chaos of other fleeting aspirations.
But more on that story here;)
Architecture
Architecture is quite simple:
The microservice thing was done to scale the productivity core thing with other mini-games like chess or poker later:
Backend
Backend consists of two microservices:
- Game service is the main service, the 'heart' of the game,
- User service is the service that is responsible for processing and storing user data
For now postgres ERD looks like this:
Technical Goals
#1 Use SvelteKit
For the frontend, I chose SvelteKit. I tried React some time ago but wanted to try Svelte as it is making a lot of noise nowadays.
This was a great decision and I learned a lot.
But at the end of a day SvelteKit is a tool that gets the job done. A great tool I would say, but I'm not a frontend developer and I
haven't seen much. It was my first frontend app (yeah I made something tiny with React.js, but that was nothing in comparison) and
somehow I managed to enjoy it when I finally understood the framework enough to finish the project.
#2 Deploy
Of course this project needed to be deployed! I wanted to help people, so I needed to make it accessible.
Frontend and backend are deployed on Ubuntu server. Frontend and backend are managed by docker.
All routing is made with nginx, so the website is accessible at taskbingo.com and to access backend it goes taskbingo.com/api.
Backend is deployed using Github Actions. It automatically builds docker images, pushes them to container registry and deploys with docker-compose.
Finally, postgres instance is deployed on other server. I thought it would be nice to have two instances with master-master replication and other cool stuff, but I think it's too much for this project.
#3 Master Go
Last but not least!. Go is just a language, just a tool, and I try to think pragmatically, but I'm completely in love with it.
Working with Go feels very natural to me, I like how the language is forcing you to write better, more readable and understandable code.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I understood a quite simple thing: tools don't mean much, they are just needed to make a product that will help someone (or yourself).