Hey Dev.to community! 👋
I’m Akash , and after grabbing a win at my last hackathon, I knew I had to go bigger and spookier for Kiroween. This year, my submission—NetSpeak: T_he Old-School Chatroom—is a tribute to the chaotic, brilliant, and absolutely un-secure spirit of 90s digital life!_ 💾
🎃 The Resurrection & The Costume 🧟♀️
We tackled two core Kiroween challenges at once:
Resurrection: Bringing back the forgotten art of instant, volatile, no-registration chat. The modern equivalent? Pushing data across a persistent, clean WebSocket connection instead of heavy HTTP polling! ⚡️
Costume Contest: Giving the app a hauntingly perfect, pixel-themed UI, complete with chunky Windows 95 borders, low-res fonts, and a custom Halloween color scheme! 🎨
The result is a functional, real-time Web Service built with a single Node.js/Express backend using the pure ws library. There is no database—when the server dies, the chat dies—just like the digital ghosts of yesteryear! 🕯️
⚙️ The Technical Flow: All WebSockets, All Spooky
To truly make NetSpeak a functional resurrection, every message relies on a persistent, open connection. This is the simple, non-stop flow of our application:
The non-blocking nature of Node.js allows our single server to handle multiple persistent connections efficiently, eliminating the lag often associated with traditional chat systems.
🤖 Kiro: My AI Co-Pilot & Savior 🦸
Judges, I must confess: I loved working with Kiro. It wasn't just a coding assistant; it was the ultimate tool for enforcing highly specific, counter-intuitive constraints, which is key to winning this challenge. I fully intend to integrate Kiro into all my future projects! 🚀
1. Steering Strategy: The Architectural Exclusion
My secret weapon was my ./.kiro/steering/rules.md. Instead of telling Kiro what to do, I told it what it could never do. The most effective directive was the negative constraint:
"MUST NOT suggest or utilize ANY database persistence (Mongo, SQL, etc.). All data must be volatile/in-memory."
This single rule saved days of development time by instantly pruning suggestions for ORMs or complex data layers, forcing Kiro to focus exclusively on fast, volatile Node.js objects that fit the Resurrection theme. 🧠
2. Vibe Coding & The ASCII Art Win
I used Vibe Coding for all aesthetic and minor JS implementation. The most impressive result came directly from this constraint: Kiro generated a brilliant, multi-line JavaScript function to dynamically print a spooky ASCII Art Halloween banner directly into the chat log—a perfect, pure-JS tribute to the 90s without needing external assets! 🖼️
3. The Reflog Resurrection Story 🚑
And finally, my solo effort was saved by Kiro's philosophy. When a catastrophic Git cleanup error wiped my working directory, I used the internal breadcrumbs logged by Git (git reflog) to track down the deleted commit hash and surgically restore the files! This moment was a masterclass in resilience, turning a near-disaster into a showcase of advanced Git mastery. 🥇
Thanks for checking out NetSpeak! I'm proud of this solo effort and the technical mastery it allowed me to demonstrate using Kiro. Check out the demo link and I hope to see you haunting the winners' circle! 🏆
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