So what is the /dev/null thing anyway? A game? an event? what?
Escape from /dev/null is a science-fiction story that you experience by coding it. That’s about it :)
The outer game map is a graph, which is navigated on a communal web-based interface. When a team decide to take a certain path from the node they’re on to a connected node, they’re presented with a challenge. The inner game is revealed step by step a challenge a time.
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From a birds-eye perspective it works like this;
- Each team logs in to a web-page which display the team position on a game map, similar to a kids game with discs connected with lines. All teams see the position of the other teams on the game map, with live updates of positions.
- When a team selects a disc to go to (from their current or starting disc) the web-page shows them the programming challenge they must complete to move to that disc. An arrow is also placed on the game-board for all other teams to see, complete with a counter which tells how many minutes the team have spent on that challenge.
- When the team think they have solved the challenge, they submit a small message through the web-page which will alert the judges (which are monitoring the game through similar web-pages of their own).
- One or more judges will then go to the team, see if they have indeed solved the challenge and do a short code review with them to see how good a solution they have found. If they are found to have passed the challenge, the judge press a button on their web-pages and the team icon will now move to the desired position.
Otherwise the team will be stuck with the challenge and will have more informal meetings with the judges until they pass.
At some discs prizes might be found which will befall the first team to reach those discs, and the first team to solve the challenge of the ‘final’ disc will have won the game (although other teams can still be allowed to try to finish off stray prizes left on the game-board until the time the game officially finishes.
But really, the event is mostly en excuse to get to know other geeks and have a good time solving practical real-world problems, instead of contrived edge-case mind-twisters. Expect lots of client-server code and having a dedicated JavaScript guy on the team might not be a bad choice at all.