EpicSpleef

Java, Spigot, Minecraft

This past February break, my friends and I were looking for a new game to play, having played the same ones throughout most of quarantine. So, I decided to build something new.

There’s a classic Minecraft minigame called Spleef: everyone gets a shovel and is standing on a platform that has nothing beneath it. You break the blocks below other players, and whoever is left standing wins. I decided to build this, but add another gameplay mechanic, powerups, that give you a special ability when you pick them up (like an enhanced jump, or a teleport).

Minecraft doesn’t built-in mechanics for mini games, so they have to be custom-built. I used Spigot (a Minecraft Server API), to implement all of the features. This included basic behavior (causing blocks to break instantly, scoring when someone falls off the platform), and complex behavior (like a throwable bomb projectile) that I needed to interface directly with the native Minecraft server code to implement.

The project was a success! My friends and I played it for the back half of February break (I built it during the first half) and had a ton of fun. There’s a clip of some gameplay taken the other day on the left.

Club Fair Attention Monopoly

Node.js, Express, Twilio, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, jQuery

Any new club’s first challenge is the high school club fair. Starting Westborough Hack Club, we needed something that both would establish ourselves as a worthy competitor to legacy clubs like Model UN or Debate, and that would attract as much attention as possible.

I had three things in mind—bright, flashy, and addictive.

I built a website with a phone number and simple message: text us a color, see what happens. We put the site on a TV at our fair table and tens of high schoolers crowded around, sending hundreds of messages. With each message, the background of the site changed to match whatever color it contained—as if by magic.

Twilio powered the phone integration, and I used Node.js with Express to receive data from Twilio. The site itself was built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

We had huge crowds of freshmen throughout the fair, resulting in 100 people signing up for a club that no one had ever heard of before.

Zoomer Be Gone

Node.js, Puppeteer, Redis, Zoom Web SDK, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Socket.io

When the pandemic hit, Hack Club turned to Zoom. Worried about Zoombombing on public calls, I was tasked with figuring out a solution.

I designed a system where, after signing up for a Zoom call with an email, students receive a Zoom link that adds a few unique characters onto the end of their username. Anyone with a marked username would immediately be admitted—removing the need for a human to moderate the waiting room, and stopping would-be Zoombombers from easily joining en masse.

To do this, I needed to join a Zoom call from a server.

After some digging, I found Zoom’s tucked-away JavaScript Web SDK, meant for enterprise customers. It has to be spun up in a fully-fledged browser though—you can’t just run the JavaScript server-side.

So, I devised a scheme to spin up the Web SDK in a headless browser (Puppeteer), and link each of the SDK functions to a WebSocket command, so that a control server could programmatically “instruct” the headless Zoom client. It detects whenever a new user joins, and then my app could tell it whether to admit that user based on whether their username had a pre-approved database entry.