An MVP in a matter of days: game rooms, WebSocket rounds, boosts and bonus points
Role
Frontend engineer on the hackathon team
Period
Apr 2026 — Apr 2026
Team
5 people
Company
Hackathons
A hackathon project: a fast-games service with rooms, real-time rounds, boosts and bonus accrual. I was responsible for the frontend and the socket server integration.
What I did
Game rooms with real-time round state
Timer and result synchronisation over WebSocket
Boosts and bonus point accrual
Room history and an admin section
FSD architecture even under hackathon pressure — so four people would not collide in the code
Problem
Constraints
A hackathon means a hard deadline and several people working in one repository at once. A mistake in code organisation costs more than in a regular project: there is no time to rewrite.
The product side required real time: several players in a room see the same round, timer and result.
Solution
What we did
We split the project into FSD layers immediately and agreed on the boundaries: everyone worked in their own slices and conflicts in shared code were minimal.
Round state is synchronised over the socket, server data is cached by the query layer, and local interface state lives in compact stores. That gave predictable behaviour without extra infrastructure.
FlagshipProductUnder NDA