I wrote a Windows 98-inspired advent calendar from scratch in a month

I am the only developer for a programming news site in Norway called kode24.no. Each year since 2018 we have run an advent calendar for our readers, where the goal always is to solve 24 tasks before christmas.

For several years the advent calendar looked like a DOS-terminal, Advent of Code-ish. Each year slightly refactored the solution, but stayed with plain react, Node.js, and mongodb.com. Well, mongodb.com shut down. Then I moved to firestore, but that got too expensive.

I knew I probably had to do som major refactoring this year.

So november came around, and we sat down to have a meeting about the calendar. We landed on a completely new system where the user plays a consultant in a fictional consultant-system where you get tasks from different companies and solve them for money. In a system that resembled an old OS.

I really wanted to refactor the solution to use typescript in front and back, and PostgreSQL for the database. But how, in only a month, while doing a bunch of other tasks?

Turns out I had underestimated how helpful ChatGPT was. In a few seconds I had the complete layout of the database with SQL queries. Next I got it to help me build the entire backend with database connections in node. It could even handles ES6 modules and TypeScript with Bun, which I was rather suprised by.

I was also able to get it to debug several TypeScript-issues I just couldn't figure out in React.

If you decide to have a look, I am using win98.css, and react-dnd (drag and drop divs), to make the frontend work.

Over 800 players have signed up already. :)