Connect 4 interview assignment

Play now

https://conscious-thistle.glitch.me/

Server may hibernate during periods of low use. Please be patient while it boots.

Get started

Tested with Node 9.x

yarn install
yarn start

Navigate browser to localhost:3000. Open second tab to start game.

Run tests

yarn run test

Implementation

I used an ExpressJS scaffold for the project structure and socket.io library for real-time communication. Connect4 implementation and socket server lives in /server and the browser React client is in /client.

Persistence

Games are persisted to an append only log in a file. Before persisting, games are serialized to a 42 character text representation of the board. It would be straightforward to use a database table with a character field in its place.

Future improvements

Improve UI!!
Better mobile experience
Persist to DB so app is stateless and can scale horizontally
Write React client tests
Remove PUG templates. Serve client from CDN.