🏁 F1 Picks

4-hours to build an F1 picks game, it's lights out and away we go! 🏎️ 💨

My family and I have been playing a game for the past couple of rounds of this Formula 1 (2024) season. The game is to predict the top three drivers per race, where after each race picks are scored - 2 points for the correct driver and position, 1 point for the correct driver. We have been sending these picks over Whatsapp and then tallying up the scores manually.

Before the Formula 1 season summer-break had ended I wanted to see how quickly I could build something which allowed us to share and score these picks online. I time-boxed 4 hours the Friday night before qualifying of the Dutch Grand Prix to see how far I could get with the build. With this time constraint I decided to use Laravel for rapid-application development and a whole lotta ChatGPT to help build out the application behaviour. From the initial ChatGPT prompt that helped me get the basic structure of the application setup I used a small script which allowed me to feed in the current source-code to the prompt to help iterate on the solution and add additional behaviour. After a lot of back n' forth with ChatGPT and a bunch of manual development I was able to ship a working application just past the 4-hour window!

After the 4-hour window I had:

• Local development environment working with Docker.
• Classless styling using new.css.
• Working user authentication via Google social login.
• Ability to record picks for a given round race (type), based on a specified pick window.
• Ability for select users (based on role) to record the race (type) results, upon which an asynchronous job is dispatched to update the relevant pick scores.
• Serverless deployment to Lambda, using Bref, Serverless Lift (for handling SQS and CloudFront concerns) and Neon.
• Domain logic spread across many different layers 😬, but it works!

Since this 4-hour stint I have:

• Restructured the repository structure to seperate local Docker and application concerns.
• Added a custom domain, instead of access via the CloudFront distribution URL.
• Extracted the custom stage (staging, production) parameters into seperate serverless.params.yml file.