Labday is one of the cornerstones of creativity in our business. During a Labday, employees are allowed to write code for their own pastime projects or familiarise themselves with interesting technologies. In fact, as output of a Labday, brilliant and interesting projects beyond one’s wildest dreams are often created. One of them is the Pinja Mystery Code Challenge.
I wonder what that might be! It is a coding game, of course. The Pinja Mystery Code Challenge is like a mystery room: There are several tasks, and if you cannot find solutions within a preset timeframe, you will lose the game. Yet, in this game, instead of jumping around in a room with a group, you play with your own computer and compete against others.
Code in the dark events have been held worldwide for some time now. It is a competition where a website is shown to contestants who then try to redesign it from scratch using the HTML and CSS languages. The game has a time limit, such as 15 minutes, and the use of any aids, starting from Google, is forbidden. The winner will be the one whose creation best corresponds to the original website.
The idea of a coding game fascinated Pinja’s people as well, but they wanted to develop it one step further. HTML and CSS forgive typos in the code while still correctly displaying the website, whereas a programming language often punishes by displaying an empty screen. However, it would not be very nice to have spent an hour writing programme code and finally see nothing at all because of a syntax error.
This gave birth to the idea of the Pinja Mystery Code Challenge: The competition would be a game that would include several short tasks. A solution should be given to each task within a timeframe of 5–10 seconds. After each task, the code would be iterated, and then automated tests would start. Should the code be invalid, you would need to stay and try to solve the problem again – otherwise you would be able to proceed to the following task.
The spice of the game would be the competition against others: You would continuously see your own progress and that of others on a shared screen. The tasks would be evaluated according to their degree of difficulty, and points would be scored for both correctly typed answers and fastness. The winner of the Pinja Mystery Code Challenge game would be the one who would succeed in yielding the most impressive score.
The Pinja Mystery Code Challenge will be further developed during this year. As the game will be published as an open source software, all who are interested in it can join in for its development. As an additional feature already planned, there will be an Avatar for each player, instead of mere names or bars, proceeding in the game along a “running track”. But who will win? This will be found out at the first Pinja Mystery Code Challenge event!
P.S. If you are interested in joining us to write code for the Pinja Mystery Code Challenge game or work with a bunch of nice people, send us an application: Recruitment
