933: Hackweek Overview - What Is It, What Did We Build

It’s Hackweek at Syntax! Scott, Wes, and CJ break down what Hackweek is all about - how they picked their projects, what came out of them, and why it’s the best excuse to experiment, build, and have fun before the deep-dive episodes roll in. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 00:04 What is Hackweek? 01:05 Hackweek projects spark motivation. 04:05 Choosing our projects. 04:34 What we chose. 05:11 CJ’s Hackweek Project. 05:51 Using SGDK C language toolkit. 07:02 Writing to an Everdrive. 08:09 What game engine did you use? Platformer Engine. LDtk. 12:11 What was the end result? 14:09 Wes’ Hackweek Project. 16:15 Why hardware projects? Watch the Video Here. 19:09 Scott’s Hackweek Project. Watch the Video Here. 21:42 Early considerations. 25:42 AI usage. Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Wes Bos?

  What's up everybody? We've got a Hack Week overview for you today. So Sentry has an entire week, as every single year, it's called Hack Week. And during Hack Week, you are allowed to go in, build absolutely whatever you want. And this is a really fun week because you don't have the pressing parts of like the rest of your business or the rest of your job sort of having to get done. You can just spend some time working on whatever it is that you want. So we all, all three of us did three totally different projects. And we're going to detail what we did just briefly here in this podcast.

• 0:42Wes Bos?

  And then in the next three episodes, we're going to go a little bit more in depth, as well as provide some a bit more video as to what we actually did, showing code, showing some of the hardware we worked on. Pretty fun projects. I'm really excited to share what I've been working on. I'm really excited to hear what these guys have been working on as well.

• 1:03Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. My name is Scott Tolinski and I gotta say, Wes, you said it's free from the normal things of work. I worked so hard on Hack Week.

• 1:14Wes Bos?

  I started a week before.

• 1:17Scott Tolinski?

  Oh my, yeah, I noticed. I saw you posting stuff on YouTube. I'm like, Wes is starting early? This is not fair. I'm gonna have to like, so I did a bunch of pre-planning work for mine because I didn't want to start too early. But I worked so hard. I put in nights. I put in extra, extra, extra time. I was working on, I woke up, was waking up early to work on it before the kids went to school. It was a long and a hard week, but honestly, the end results were pretty amazing for all of us, I think. CJ, how about you? We have, by the way, audio folks, CJ Reynolds is joining us today because he also did a great Hack Week project.

• 1:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, so same experience. I think that's one of the things about being able to work on anything you want. You can pick the things that you're like really passionate about. And yeah, I got sick last week, or was that Hack Week? Whatever Hack Week was, because I'm still recovering. But I still, I worked through the sickness because I was so, I liked my idea so much. And so, yeah, it was really fun.

• 2:14Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. It does say something about motivation here. We often talk about motivation on this show as like, when you are motivated to work on a project, you will push through and learn so much more. And I, I used a bunch of technologies that I was fairly familiar with, but threw them together in a way that I have not used them before. And because I was so motivated to fix this, man, it was such a joy to learn and to push through and work on all this stuff, just because of the sheer motivation of it all. People out there, if you are in a place of having any sort of influence over your company, get them to set up a Hack Week. The

• 2:57Scott Tolinski?

  results that came out of Sentry's Hack Week were unreal. Did you guys watch the presentations for the Sentry Hack Week?

• 3:07Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I watched all the Toronto ones. And there's, there's some really cool stuff. A lot of people exploring stuff, but a lot of people are simply just like fixing stuff that bugs them, you know? Like, it's just like, this has bugged me in Sentry forever. And, and here, I just went and fixed it, you know? I took a week and went and fixed it. And everyone was like, holy shit, that's way better. Yeah.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Sentry has awards for all of the Hack Week participants. And one of them is just ship it. And that's where people can vote on, hey, this is something we need, so ship it. And there were, there were several in the demos that were like, yeah, this is awesome. Like this, why does, why didn't this already exist in Sentry?

• 3:44Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, there, there is, by all accounts, projects that come out of the Hack Week every single year that go directly into Sentry, either months later, weeks later, half a year later. I mean, valuable stuff comes out of this thing. There was 156 submitted projects.

• 4:03Wes Bos?

  That's amazing. But so we didn't actually build stuff for Sentry. We built stuff either for the hell of it because we are interested in how it works. And we get to talk about it and explain it to you, the listener. Or I know Scott built something that we've been dearly needed. So let's do this right now. Let's do each of us can give a one sentence of what we built just to hook y'all.

• 4:29Scott Tolinski?

  Elevator pitch.

• 4:30Wes Bos?

  And then, and then we'll go into, I don't know, 10 minutes or so explaining what it is that we did. So I built a real time web controlled LED grid, which I have right behind me. And that was a lot of fun.

• 4:45Scott Tolinski?

  I built a real time competitive coding platform focused on real world user interface challenges.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  Nice. And I built a custom Sega Genesis game. I'm going to swap to the camera. It's, it's running on the Sega right now. I'll tell you all about it, but you might not, you can't see it usually because it's blurred. But there's a Sega back there and I built something for it.

• 5:08Wes Bos?

  Unreal. I can't wait to hear. But let's, let's, I don't necessarily care that much about minor Scots. I want to know how the hell you built a Sega game. So let's start with you.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 5:18Wes Bos?

  I'm just joking. I am excited about that. But like, man, when you told us you were doing a Sega game, I was like, how do you even do that?

• 5:25Speaker 02

  Yes. And that was my question too. So yeah, day one was, is this even possible? And I had a hello world by the end of eight hours. It took me eight hours to get a hello world. But the, the modern ecosystem for doing this kind of thing has like, kind of exploded. I say modern, a lot of these tools haven't really been updated in three, four years, but the technology is 30, over 30 years old.

• 5:48Scott Tolinski?

  Relatively modern. Yes.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. So how did I do it? There is a software development toolkit called SGDK and it allows you to write C code for the Sega Genesis. So the Sega Genesis, all of the original games that were written for it were actually written with assembly code. And so assembly code is basically exact processor instructions and it's very low level. It's not zeros and ones, but it is. It says like move this variable into this memory location, that kind of thing. But with the SGD, you can write C code and it abstracts all of that away. So for a modern developer, it's a lot more approachable. You have functions you can call that say like, uh, create a sprite and set sprite location and different things like that.

• 6:33Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I think my favorite assembly code video game lore is that the roller coaster tycoon game was written in assembly.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  And that's crazy.

• 6:44Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, written in assembly by one guy.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  The 3D game we're talking about, right? Like.

• 6:49Scott Tolinski?

  Roller coaster tycoon, the, the, the, yeah.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, yeah. And so, yeah, and so, yeah, day one was just getting a hello world. And with the SGD, it was fairly simple. They have a bunch of samples of like different kinds of things that you can do. I had the idea on day one, I proved that I could do it. And then at the end of the day, I ordered what's called an everdrive. So this is a Sega cartridge that you can put an SD card in and you can just put whatever ROMs you want onto that SD card. And that's how I have it actually running on the Sega.

• 7:17Wes Bos?

  Oh, okay.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:19Wes Bos?

  Man.

• 7:20Scott Tolinski?

  Wow.

• 7:20Wes Bos?

  You know, you're in deep when, when C is the abstraction level, you know? Like, like I'm sitting here writing TypeScript, which is about 14 more abstractions on top of that.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I will say for anybody that wants to dip their toes in this stuff, um, it's not that scary. I, I think like a hello world C program, like the, the main thing about C is like, it's, it's lower level in that you have to manage memory. And there's a lot more things you have to do manually, but it's the, the JavaScript and TypeScript language are C style languages. There, the, the syntax itself was informed by literally the C language. So even just looking at C code as a JavaScript developer will look somewhat familiar. It's nothing crazy. It's just, you kind of have to learn about pointers and structures, which if you learned objects, you can, you can learn those things as well.

• 8:09Scott Tolinski?

  I, I'm curious about the game engine side of things.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 8:13Scott Tolinski?

  Because your game was like a little platformer, a little Sierra, uh, Sentry Sierra logo was bouncing around. Well, what, like what game engine is that?

• 8:25Speaker 02

  Yes, so there's nothing official and that was so day, I wrote like a whole timeline of what I went through, but. Day three was where I was like, okay, I need to figure out if there's a game engine now. Day two was, can I just get graphics on the screen? And I ended up getting a Sentry logo. My idea was, so if you've ever played Sonic the Hedgehog, you know, at the beginning of Sonic the Hedgehog, it says Sega. I wanted to do Sentry. Oh, yeah. With the Sentry logo. So day two was like, could I just get graphics on the screen? And S G D K made that fairly trivial, except you have to worry about memory. This thing only has, I think, is it 16K kilobytes of memory?

• 9:08Speaker 02

  And then the Sega itself supports 256 different colors, but there can only be up to 64 colors on the screen at a time. And then for any given tile, because it's a tile-based system, that tile can only have up to 16 colors. So learning all of that was probably the hardest part is like, figure out, how can I convert my images to be just 16 colors? And then from there, if they're too big, I have to break them down so that they can get loaded onto the screen. Yeah, so that was day two. But then after I figured out all of that, I was like, okay, I want to be able to design a level and not have to like literally write zeros and ones in an array to define like collisions

• 9:52Speaker 02

  or where tiles should be. And so I found a project called Platformer Engine, and it's just someone that was working on this like over five years ago, and they tried to make it a little bit easier. So basically, they had C code for a camera, for a player, for joystick movement. So basically, all of that code was written for me where it was fairly high level to say, move player to X location, move player to Y location. They wrote that code for me. And then they had a fairly simple level loader. So they basically had this giant image that was like a level.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  And then they had a C matrix, like a width by height matrix that defined where all of the collisions were on this map. So imagine like a flat tile map. And then for each tile, you can say, well, this is a ground tile, or this is that kind of thing. And so in their code, they literally had a giant array where it was zeros if they shouldn't collide, and then ones if they should collide. So one if it's ground. So they had all of that code written. And then that so that made it fairly trivial. So basically, they had an example map, they had the collisions, and then I could start to go in and modify things. Because there's for modern web, for modern game development, there's a lot of tools out there for developing

• 11:14Speaker 02

  levels and developing tile maps. So the TLDK was the first one I came across.

• 11:19Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, TLDK. LDtk. Dude, I've messed that up so many times.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  Level Designer Toolkit. Yeah, it's a GUI app where you can like draw with tiles, and then it exports. And so this engine supported that. And it made it so that I could load the map in, I could define my own tile sets, and then load that into the game.

• 11:38Scott Tolinski?

  Cool. Yeah, I explored the LDtk when I was checking out Godot. It is like, it's it's pretty, pretty dope.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, a lot of people use it even for building Unity games, which is, it's something to be said about like, yeah, it's 30 years later, but now I can use these more modern tools to work on such a like a simpler, lower level game.

• 11:58Wes Bos?

  That's cool. I have so many questions just about even just storing graphics, but I'll hold it for the longer video that we do.

• 12:05Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, we'll be doing a technical deep dive, folks. So if anybody wants to get deep onto these things. CJ, what was the end result of your hack week? How did you finished it? You made your, you made your video game. What did you get out of it?

• 12:21Speaker 02

  Well, I'll say the end result is I only have a single level. I spent, like I said, a day figuring out graphics, a day figuring out just can I have some sort of game engine? So I don't have to write all this with zeros and ones in arrays. And so on the last day, I was just scrambling to get my own custom graphics in there and my own custom level. So at the end of the day, I'll show you if you're if you're watching on the video pod. This is the game. You are, second, my controller needs to turn on, but you are seer, this little triangle here. And my thought is you can collect traces. So these little balls are traces. And eventually, you'd be able to bottle, battle a bug boss where you throw

• 13:01Speaker 02

  traces at him to solve the bug. But this is the one level. Basically, it's just like a platformer that moves up. And you can, and you can jump across. So that was my finished result. I mean, I'm not proud of the fact that I didn't get a full game. Like, there's no boss level. Basically, this, this level is the only one. But the fact that you can create at least an entire level in less than a week these days is, is I think, pretty impressive. Yeah. So that's the outcome. Didn't get to finish the game. What did I learn? There's so much more I want to do. One of my initial ideas was, I wanted to connect my Sega to the internet, just because it sounds ludicrous. Like, why would you do that? But it should actually be possible. So now, in my spare time, I'm gonna be, I'm

• 13:45Speaker 02

  gonna be looking into it. Because one thing I learned is the Sega controllers are actually a nine pin serial port. So you can actually read and write data from where you plug a controller into. And that could potentially connect you to the internet. Okay.

• 13:59Wes Bos?

  That's cool.

• 14:01Scott Tolinski?

  All right. Let's save some of this for the deep dive. Because we're getting a little too in the weeds. Yeah.

• 14:06Wes Bos?

  Yes. This is cool.

• 14:07Scott Tolinski?

  We got a lot of questions. Okay, next one. Wes.

• 14:10Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 14:11Scott Tolinski?

  You made something with hardware, as always. This is your third hack week project. And all of them have used hardware. Is that correct?

• 14:19Wes Bos?

  Yes. Yes, all of them. The first time, I did a little custom keyboard shortcut thing. Second, that did some LED lights. Last year, I did, what did I do last year?

• 14:31Speaker 02

  Printer.

• 14:33Wes Bos?

  Oh, receipt printer. Yeah, that auto printed off like photos and videos for, or not photos, but photos and text from people on the internet. And it auto printed my, my Sentry issues, which was really cool. And this year, I did a real time drawing LED grid that is, is web controlled. So it was really cool. Because I I had to build the whole hardware LED grid right here. I had to solder a whole bunch of stuff together. I designed a whole bunch of stuff in in 3D and 3D printed it. And then I built a whole software stack. So there is like a there's a backend which I built into Cloudflare Workers. I'll go into the weeds on that in the next video.

• 15:16Wes Bos?

  And then I use Party Server that connected it to a React-based front end. And and you're able, anybody's able to go ahead and draw on it. And like like right now, there's there's four people in it right now. Which is kind of fun. I had like 80 people in it at at one point. And everybody sees it. And then I wrote a whole like, um. I don't know if you call like a reckons reconciliation engine. But basically, I wrote a whole thing on the server that would take the pixels that have changed as part of like the the web app state. And then it would send it over to the grid. If you're watching the video, it looks like crap on my camera, but it looks so good in person.

• 15:59Wes Bos?

  Like, the colors are just absolutely beautiful and I'm really happy with it. It's just very filming light is a very hard thing to do, especially when you're also trying to film yourself.

• 16:10Scott Tolinski?

  It's all light. Technically, you're filming light even if you're not filming light.

• 16:15Wes Bos?

  But like, honestly, I love doing hardware projects because it like CJ gives you a bit more of an appreciation for constraints. I hit so many things that were that I would not necessarily hit in like a web app just because there's there's limited memory, there's there's network latency, there's low-powered processors. The thing is running on an ESP32 microcontroller. I have power constraints because this is turns out this is a hell of a lot of LEDs. You know, I have a huge appreciation for it. There's there's you can only update it so often.

• 16:56Wes Bos?

  You know, I tried to do real-time video where it would take my webcam or I did do it. It takes my webcam and paints it in real time to the LED grid. So it gives you so much more of an appreciation for people who work. On hardware, where you have so many more constraints, as well as as people who work in like like IOT, where you're trying to connect this stuff to the internet. And you don't necessarily have, you can't just NPM install something and slap it on like a $5 microcontroller. There's you're a lot more limited in things that you can touch.

• 17:34Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 17:35Speaker 02

  I suppose I love how big it is because like I've tried to do little hardware projects with like a mini mini LED matrix like that, or even even smaller than that. And it was a pain to get it up and going. So I can't imagine wiring. You have six panels or nine panels up there?

• 17:49Wes Bos?

  Nine panels. So this is a 16 by 16.

• 17:54Scott Tolinski?

  It is big.

• 17:55Wes Bos?

  Panels. So it's 256 and they have nine of those, which is about what 2306 or whatever? Who's good at their 16 base math? And just simply scaling it up was was kind of a hard thing to do because there are power constraints, right? Like basically, the way that this works is that the the power is injected in on one. I'm getting the weeds, but there's power constraints and you can't just run a whole bunch of power right through it, right? You have to inject the power. And then there's constraints around sending a lot of 200, 2300 pixel updates at once. And there's constraints around what's the best protocol over the network to do it? So I'll get into all the weeds there. So that was really fun.

• 18:39Wes Bos?

  And like this is the first like bigger project I've done with durable objects. I built three or four things here and there with it. But this was like the first time where I spent several days working with CloudFlare's durable objects. And it was kind of a kind of a fun one.

• 18:55Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, that's so dope. Yeah, you took an opportunity to pick new tech or different tech.

• 19:02Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 19:02Scott Tolinski?

  Hardware, software, all encompassing. And I got to applaud that that rules.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  Definitely.

• 19:09Wes Bos?

  All right, let's hear what you got.

• 19:10Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, so I made a, uh, yeah, real time coding platform for my other hack weeks. I, I think they, they all haven't been in real time. The first one I did was like, uh, I wanted to do like a Notion replacement that saved to Markdown. So that way we could edit notes in real time, but save to Markdown. I could do that so much better today if I were to take on that project again. It ultimately wasn't very successful. It, it, it worked, it like created PRs and stuff, but could have been better. The second year CJ and I teamed up and did a Tori app for our production assistant where it can create show notes and stuff. And, uh, Randy uses that app. We gotta push out an update. I got a, a little modification I need to make to it, but it's a, it's an app. It's in my desktop right now, Syntax Production Assistant. So very successful there.

• 19:55Scott Tolinski?

  And this year I decided to take a, a bite off something that was kind of large and build a competitive coding platform. Um, we do our, our CSS battles on YouTube and we've often lamented that they're not real world UI. Many people in the comments have said the same thing, like, what's the point? They're writing bad code just to finish. And the point is for it to be fun, but, uh, I just was wondering like, all right, is there another way? And then I just started getting into all these interesting ideas of like, well, what if we wanted to write the code on our own machines and have it update? So I, it gave me an opportunity to explore, you know, my, uh, local data syncing system stuff.

• 20:33Scott Tolinski?

  It gave me an opportunity to work deeply with the file system API and then, uh, build a, a full on ass app that has, uh, login accounts and what my, my schema file is 500 lines long. So it is a legitimate application that we will be releasing here, uh, so that other people can use this and engage in battles and, uh, put together leaderboards and all kinds of fun stuff.

• 21:00Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm pretty excited about that because like me and you did a. What was it? Like, we did like a button, like, can we build this button sort of as a CSS battle, but also like, this is, this is real world. This is something you would actually do instead of just try to put like a Pokemon ball on a screen. And I love those types of challenges as well, because you often see something cool on a website. You say, I, I would love to rebuild that. And I wonder what, how Scott would approach this type of thing.

• 21:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 21:30Wes Bos?

  And we, yeah, we would just use Veet locally, but it's just so much better to be able to like, have like a full blown app as well as for editing sake, you know, being able to see what, how everyone's doing all in one screen.

• 21:43Scott Tolinski?

  There is a number of benefits here, and a lot of that was taken into consideration when I was like, planning this out. Like, one, we need some way to make it fun for viewers, right? Because that was the big concern. It's like, we record these things, we've done a couple of UI battles, and we're like, I guess who won? We choose who wins? Okay, that's really hard to do. So like, having user voting was one thing, but like, what are they voting on? So I had voting on like, most accurate, most real world code, and like, how is, how does it feel? The best feel? So users can vote on those parameters. They can use the code, because the code is being loaded as not just an image, it's being loaded as code. They can use it and try it out. So voters, the audience, can now vote.

• 22:28Scott Tolinski?

  And we could publish the battle results before we publish the video. Therefore, people can vote, and we can use that in the video.

• 22:37Wes Bos?

  I love that.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  Definitely. I will say, Scott, you, you win the Just Ship It Award for the syntax team, because this is something we need, and we have wanted.

• 22:46Wes Bos?

  Yes.

• 22:46Speaker 02

  And like, yeah, the elevator pitch is CSS battles, but real UI. And that's awesome, because I think, yeah, other people would use this too. That's some of the comments I saw whenever your Hack Week demo video was playing. People also said, we could use this for interviews, like, when they're, when they're hiring somebody to like, build UIs. Because you can see, like, what they're working on in real time, you can see their code. So yeah, it's, it's, it's an awesome idea.

• 23:10Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, there's a lot here. A lot of fun technical challenges. And the first Hack Week I did, when I did the real time, whatever, about like, three days into the Hack Week, I was like, nothing is working out. I've changed the libraries like, eight times. I'm like, struggling to do anything. And this time...

• 23:32Scott Tolinski?

  By day one, I had login, I had the whole coding interface, not like the UI for it done, but like saving files locally, saving to the data. Like I had all of the difficult technical challenges done day one. And then day two could be focused on app stuff. And then day three could be focused on UI. And then day four focused on like CSS and UI. So it was like the technical challenges portion of this got done in a way that was so acceptable so early. And that's a largely a testament to the stack that I'm working in. So when we detail that stack, um, I'll, I'll, I'll show you guys just how simple this application is to work on.

• 24:13Scott Tolinski?

  And that's one of the big reasons I was able to do so much. I built a whole ass admin interface for this thing too, which you guys didn't even see. So.

• 24:23Wes Bos?

  It was really interesting to see the caliber of stuff that people built because they were able to use AI. It's just incredible that like, like just from last year, like last year we had AI, but like this year, we have different levels, like five coding, absolutely everything and spitting out like whole ass apps, which is, is wild, wild to see. Like people are able to take their ideas. And even producer Randy, we're gonna have a whole video. He, he made like a whole ass app. And it was, it's unreal what he actually built. And, and like, he's like, I don't know. I'm just like a video guy.

• 25:04Scott Tolinski?

  My favorite thing about Randy's presentation was when at the end, he was like, if you want to know how any of this works, don't ask me. I don't know. That is so funny.

• 25:15Speaker 02

  So I kind of saw it as a challenge too, because I was writing C code and like the SGDK, which wasn't that popular, like how well could AI actually write code within that context? And I, and I figured out some things, which I'll share on the deep dive. Like it wasn't perfect. And so I was also kind of at a handicap where I don't have a bunch of trained code that this thing could just generate on. Yeah, I did figure out some ways to work in older code bases with it.

• 25:42Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I want to ask you guys about your usage of AI in this project. How much did you use AI and what did you use it for?

• 25:49Wes Bos?

  I used it. Pretty heavily for the the front end. So what I had done is I had built this like real time drawing thing. I don't know, maybe six months ago. And I just, I just took that and I just said, convert it to react, right? And I built it in vanilla and it did all of that. And I leaned on it pretty heavily for the front end because I was spending so much time hardware wise, you know, designing, soldering, building all of that stuff together. And then, and then also like quite a bit of of my time was trying to understand how to best send the data from the like this, the server diffing to the actual hardware,

• 26:34Wes Bos?

  right? There's a lot of challenges there. So I spent a lot of my time doing that. And then being able to just like, type in, make a react component that has buttons on and call server functions was so nice. Because like, I could have spent all week just building a straight up react app and not focused on this stuff.

• 26:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'd have to agree. It let me focus on the things I wanted to focus on. And which was like C coding and then like building the game itself. So I used AI heavily, but often for like one off scripts as well. So I needed to create a lot of assets and like convert image types. So I'd use AI to generate an image magic script that can convert images. SDK has resource loading. So like, it can automatically turn images into the right type and stuff like that. But I also wanted it to automatically load collision maps from an exported thing. And I used, and you write that with Java. So I used cursor to help me write all of that Java code to generate those, those resource importers. And then

• 27:34Speaker 02

  I kind of also mainly used the chat at one point to give it the context of my C code base. And then I would ask it questions. Like, I didn't want it doing too much in the C code base itself. But I was just like, how do I do this? Or how would I do this? Or how would I go about this? It give me like four options. And then instead of saying, let it do it, I would go off and pick one of the options and implement myself.

• 27:55Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, that's dope. I had a hard time using AI for anything actually code related.

• 28:06Scott Tolinski?

  Because, man.

• 28:08Scott Tolinski?

  It's still a massive struggle to get AI to play nice with Svelte 5. It is a massive struggle and the amount of time I spend going back and forth with it, no matter what the model, no matter how I have it set up, no matter how many times I beg it to use Context 7, I have, it's just, it's making bad choices. So it ultimately ended up being a result where I was moving so fast coding that like it was slowing me down to have AI generate any code for me. So I mostly used AI for planning and for being like, what am I missing in this database schema? This is what I'm planning on building? Like, can you, am I missing any indexes?

• 28:51Scott Tolinski?

  Like, am I missing any relationships? What do you think I should have in here that I haven't thought of? And like, that actually was very successful because the AI was able to determine for me things like, well, down the line, you might not need this right now, but it seems like you'll probably want this at some point in the, in the schema. I'm like, okay, I'll add it in the schema, thank you. And I think that in that aspect, it was, is helpful, but coding wise, it slowed me down. This is like a really, yeah, rough slog for using AI, but it was, it was very fast to work in coding wise, so I didn't need it.

• 29:25Wes Bos?

  That's, I just added a, a show idea. Cause like, that's, that's a show in itself is using AI for either undocumented or new libraries as well. Cause like, I, I've hit that quite a bit with like stuff where there's just, there's no prior art in using this thing.

• 29:41Scott Tolinski?

  No prior art, yeah.

• 29:42Wes Bos?

  And no matter how much you force feed at the docs, it just starts imagining stuff. So CJ just, CJ just dropped his artwork on my LED grid.

• 29:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, cause it's pixel art, so it looks awesome. That's awesome.

• 29:57Wes Bos?

  Oh yeah, you're right. Man, it's, it looks so good.

• 30:01Scott Tolinski?

  What is the URL for this thing again?

• 30:03Wes Bos?

  Local.wesboss.com. I'll explain how I, I just ran my local V server on, on my computer. And then I just proxied it out to the internet and I had like hundreds of people. Someone started spamming it at some point, which made my internet stop working. But for the most part, it ran for like a week.

• 30:25Scott Tolinski?

  Man, this is so dope, Wes.

• 30:27Wes Bos?

  We'll deal that, we'll, we'll get a little bit more into. We'll get a little bit more into that in the following videos. Anything else to add, guys?

• 30:37Scott Tolinski?

  Um, I don't have anything else to add. I'm really excited to share with you our, um, our, our full projects in a deep way. So if you are excited about that, come check us out. We're going to be doing these. They're going to be the next few episodes here and we're going to go deep dive on technical. We're going to be showing code. We're going to be talking all things about how we made them and getting really deep into them. There, there's some amazing things to learn through all of these projects. So let us know what you think. Again, if you can swing a hack week at your place of work, my gosh, this was so much fun. And I do think it was so valuable. If you can, uh, get a week off to work, a week off to work on crazy stuff. Man, the, the end results are, are really pretty impressive, uh, company wide.

• 31:22Scott Tolinski?

  So yeah, a shout out to Sentry for planning such a great hack week, producing such a great hack week. And shout out to everyone at Sentry for bringing their A-game. I, I showed up to this thing and Courtney's like, what are you putting so much time in? He said, I'm coming to win. I'm doing this to win. And then after watching all the videos, she was like, are you going to win? I was like, I don't know. I don't know. I have no idea. Everybody was so good. It was crazy. So yeah, shout out to the whole, the whole org. Everybody rules at Sentry. Um, and we will catch you in the next one, folks.

• 31:53Speaker 02

  Peace.

• 31:54Scott Tolinski?

  Peace.

• 31:54Wes Bos?

  Peace.