LiveQuiz

Purpose

As a cinephile, the oscars are kind of a big deal for me. I started hosting a watch party about three years ago and have slowly added new traditions. This year, I wanted to upgrade the score keeping aspect from pen and paper, to something digital. This was an opportunity to use my software engineering power for good.

How It's Made

As with every project, I like to try something new. Even though it wasn't intuitive to me, I chose to use GraphQL for the API layer. It uses the Apollo platform for the server and client. It was super easy to set up. I am not sure my implementation takes advantage of the various capabilities of the GraphQL schema. I did enjoy thinking about data fetching in a different way. I think if there were more entities or if the project was a mobile app, I could see myself going down this path again. Until then, REST it is.

This was also the first time I used Railway to host. No complaints, the free tier was exactly what I needed for my small watch party of around 20 people.

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About halfway through this project, I started using GitHub Copilot to speed up the development cycle. This was a first for me so I learned quite a bit. I found out that I am not opposed to using Generative AI for coding. I would much rather spend my brain power on creative endeavors like choosing a color palette/font, designing a UI, or writing this paragraph. Let the AI worry about TypeScript syntax and finding the most efficient way to determine if a string is a palindrome. I'll do the software engineering.

What's Next

The website worked pretty great for my party. There were a few hiccups with tie-breakers and the price is right rule that I'll need to address before next year. Other than that I don't have a need for it so this can sit on the backburner for now. It feels really cool to build custom software for your life. I must think of the next project soon.