My Adventure on the Web Dev Challenge - Caffeine, Code, and Cameras!

I recently did something that ranks in the top 5 coolest experiences of my professional life: competing on the Web Dev Challenge!

For anyone considering this wild ride in the future (or just curious about what happens when you put stressed-out devs in front of cameras), here’s my behind-the-scenes recap. Plus, some much-deserved shoutouts to the amazing humans I met along the way!

If you’re the “skip to the good part” type, watch the full episode here!

Before the Challenge

Huge shoutout to Jason Hill for all the photos from the event!

I had previously been on Leet Heat in January in an episode that has yet to be aired. Jason reached out to me in mid-February to see if I would be available to film the Web Dev Challenge in early March, and I said hell yeah! There was a catch, though. I had to find a partner!

Cue montage of me frantically scrolling through contacts like I was speed-dating for developers. The challenge was real:

Enter: Dave Schwantes, a developer from a fellow billing team at GitHub. We’d previously collaborated on the engineering mentorship program, and I knew he was a fellow keyboard warrior with his own blog (Don’t Break Prod – check it out!).

Was it a stretch to ask him to drop everything, including dad duties to young kids, and jet off to Portland with minimal warning? Absolutely. But his response told me everything:

So, this sounds like a pretty weird experience that makes me a little nervous, so I kind of want to do it! I just watched a bit of a few of the episodes and they seem fun.

That’s the spirit, Dave! Embrace the chaos!

With had a small amount of time to plan. We knew the prompt and that we’d need to use the Mock Server from Postman, but we had precious little bandwidth to strategize between our day jobs. We landed on something parent-related since we both understood those pain points all too well. The rest would be… improvisation.

The Pre-Game Dinner: Meeting My Teammate IRL

The first time I actually met Dave in person was at the dinner the night before filming at Jason and Marisa’s house. Yes, we work together at GitHub… But we are all remote!

Jason and Marisa were excellent hosts. Their cooking skills and kitchen deserve their own HGTV special. Absolutely phenomenal.

This dinner served as our “getting-to-know-you” mixer with the other competitors:

• Michael Liendo and Will Johnson, the incredibly named “Ominous Malaysian Tiger” team
• Abbey Perini and Alex Riviere repping “Everything is Awesome” (spoiler: they were)
• Sterling Chin and Tiffany Thain representing Postman

Joel Hooks crashed the party too, giving me a chance to bond with a fellow PDX Vancouver-ite!

As the night went on, my pre-competition jitters transformed into excitement. This wasn’t just going to be a coding challenge – it was going to be a coding challenge with cool people!

Lights, Camera, Copilot!

The whole experience was a caffeinated blur:

First stop: hair and makeup. Like, real hair and makeup, for a real set, with a real film crew!

The desk setup was so impressive it inspired me to upgrade my home battlestation.

The filming schedule was meticulously orchestrated:

• 30 minutes of frantic planning (where we made a plan)
• Pre-show confessional (where we talked about our plan)
• 2 hours of build time (interrupted by on-camera interviews where we tried to sound confident)
• Brief lunch break (inhaling food while trying to let our brains rest)
• 2 final hours of building (stress levels increasing exponentially by the minute)
• Demo and group feedback (big celebration vibes, we did it!)

By the end of filming, we were all pretty exhausted. We had a 2-hour break before our farewell dinner, and I spent the majority of it introverting and staring at my phone while my brain became mush.

We regrouped for an incredible dinner at Laurelhurst Market in Portland, where we all decompressed, hung out, and celebrated wrapping the day. The vibes were high all day and it was a TON of fun!

Postman: Not Just For Delivering APIs

Special appreciation mention for Postman, who sponsored this coding adventure! This isn’t just obligatory sponsor praise – I’ve used Postman throughout my career, but this experience showed me features I hadn’t fully appreciated before.

Their mock server was a hackathon game-changer. We quickly created requests/responses with a YAML file, fed it into the mock server, and poof – instant API endpoint for me to iterate on the frontend! In fact, it took me longer to battle CORS when integrating with Dave’s actual API than it did to get the mock server running. 😂

Definitely adding this tool to my regular rotation – and getting to learn from actual Postman folks was the cherry on top!

The Real Prize: New Friends

The biggest highlight? The people. Every single participant brought their A-game in both skills and personality. There is something so incredibly special about spending the day with a bunch of other developers, building cool things for the fun of it. Everyone was celebratory and so supportive throughout the entire day. Jason deserves an A+ for casting – this group clicked immediately, and I’ve already added them all to my “professional network” (read: people I like to bug on the internet).

If you ever get invited to do something wildly outside your comfort zone like this… DO IT! This ranks among the best professional experiences I’ve had. The memories, connections, and mild trauma from coding under pressure were 100% worth it.

Now, what are you waiting for? Go watch us panic-code for your entertainment!