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Comment by shafyy | Hacker News Reader

Hey Varun, that's super impressive - At 15 I was playing World of Warcraft for 12 hours a day - I wish I started earlier with coding :-)

I like the gamification/customization aspect and I guess that resonates well with your fellow students.

Can you tell us a bit more about the tech stack you're using and about some product choices you made? E.g., why do you only allow log in with Google (is it because that's what students use anyways?).

I make and run a small project called Fugu (https://fugu.lol), which is an open-source and privacy-friendly product analytics tool. I'd love to offer a forever-free account to use for Quickz if you like. Just send me a quick email if you're interested: canolcer@hey.com

Edit: Somehow, I'm not able to select answers when I'm hosting a deck. I tried with Safari and Firefox. What am I missing?

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Thank you, I really appreciate it!

Quickz is built on a SvelteKit, powered by a Node.JS backend that handles the database and creates a thread for each game room. I chose MongoDB for the database, because I found that the non relational approach helps with the complex structure of the decks. It's self-hosted at home using a Dell Optiplex running Ubuntu Server right now, but eventually I'll have to move to a better hosting setup. :)

Currently it only supports Google login, mostly because I don't trust myself enough to safely manage and store credentials. Many schools are already in the Google ecosystem, so for now it should be enough. However, I'm not a huge fan of my website depending on a single third party, so I'm going to have to work on that soon.

The host's screen is just a mirror of what the players will see, and so you can't interact with it, apart from going forwards and back. I think this needs to be communicated better, so I will be also working on improving the UI/UX on that.

> Currently it only supports Google login, mostly because I don't trust myself enough to safely manage and store credentials. Many schools are already in the Google ecosystem, so for now it should be enough.

That's senior-level decision making right there!

Storing creds is tough, all your users already have Google accounts, and most of them probably prefer logging in with a click rather than remembering a new set of creds. It also puts a higher barrier of entry for fraud, since new Google accounts require phone number verification.

I'm a SRE so if you need ideas for the hosting/infrastructure side of things, feel free to ask!

Very interesting, thanks for sharing.

> The host's screen is just a mirror of what the players will see, and so you can't interact with it, apart from going forwards and back. I think this needs to be communicated better, so I will be also working on improving the UI/UX on that.

Ah, I see. That makes sense, sorry for my noob question =D

Usually you do not answer question when hosting but display the questions on a big screen, in Kahoot the participants do not see the questions on their own screens but have to watch the big screen of the presenter.

To Varun, this is a nicely done clone.

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