SuperCTF.com

❓ Why Did I start working on SuperCTF.com

I have a deep love of IO games. I think they fill a difficult niche: You can enjoy them as a game, feel a competitive drive, and avoid severe addiction. Well... most of the time you won't get overly addicted.

I started assisting in the development of SuperCTF.com after I went on a two or three day binge and got several characters into the top 10. There is a chance they are still there even after I post this... look for anyone with the name PEDM on the homepage.

After chatting with Carshall (the founder), I saw joining the team as a great opportunity to get my hands dirty with backend development, specifically in the realm of SQL & webSockets.

🏗️ How Did I build SuperCTF.com

Just to be entirely clear, this was a team effort. In total there are four of us: Carshall (FullStack), Me (FullStack no Godot), JamJar (Godot), Teho (Art).

A partial list of my efforts/accomplishments can be seen below:

vanilla http connections -> connection pooling
no file structure (one 3000 line file) -> structured reusable routes
Added Error logging
Javascript -> Typescript
Callback hell -> Async/await
Godot frontend -> React (react-query) frontend
and much more!

The API is a Typescript Express API connected to a MySQL DB and the Frontend is a React frontend powered by react-query and a couple other libraries.

Now if you're wondering how exactly the game is built... I couldn't say much. I can only shed light on the landing page, API and DB, the game is created in Godot (similar to C++) and compiled into a wasm file that I copy and paste into our frontend repo.

💡 What Are my takeaways from building SuperCTF.com

Building is better with friends! This may seem obvious but hear me out. If you're lucky you have a couple friends at the company you work for. It's only logical to think that when you go to work and build things this qualifies as "Building with friends". It is, but not in the way I mean it. I mean "building with friends" in the 2 foot POV, multicolored block way. Some chaos, little missions and a lot of messing around.

I think carefully about what projects I spend my time on, and whether what I'm doing at any given time is at least a "local optimum". When working on SuperCTF it feels like some of that analysis is striped away. I'm just a kid with blocks again.

There are obviously technical takeaways to my work at SuperCTF, but I'll hold off on them until our block castle is more complete.