Sloptic: does your app work, or does it "work"?

You built something and it "works". But do you know whether it works?

Most of us don't. Your tests pass, your demos are pristine, it's so damn responsive, surely your app works, right? But what happens when someone clicks "save" and their data doesn't show up, for example? Now does your app work? Or does it "work"?

So I built Sloptic. You paste a link to your app and it goes in, pokes around, dings you on the slop it finds, and basically checks if your app works. Less slop is better, obviously.

By "slop" I mean the stuff no app should ever have. Should an app leave a secret sitting in the code it ships? No. Should an app take eleven seconds to load? No. Should an app crash because somebody typed emojis into a form or got a little overloaded? No and no. Sloptic checks for these and doesn't care what your app does, which means that every app is checked like every other.

Something funny happened when, in the course of building, I used Sloptic to grade over 1,600 web apps from 80 hackathons. Almost 3 in 5 had significant slop, and a quarter of them had slop so bad it makes a user slam their mouse. Funny enough, winners somehow shipped more slop than the rest. (You would think it's the opposite?!) After all, judges are too busy looking at the demo and wondering if the app is even worth building.

So try it at sloptic.org and tell me what it finds. And if you're organizing a hackathon, we got you covered.