My Entry to "Daj Się Poznać" Competition

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In this blog post I intent to give a brief overview of “Daj się poznać” competition and some reasoning why I decided to join it.

Few words about “Daj Się Poznać”

“Daj się poznać” (in English: “Let yourself known”) is a competition aimed at Polish programming community and it’s idea is to help programmers to be more involved in both blogging and open source work.

Currently it’s aimed only at the polish market, so all content on the official website is in Polish, most of the participants are blogging in Polish, only few in English.

The rules are quite simple. Over the course of 10 weeks (until the end of May 2016) you are supposed to work on your side project (Open Source), and keep a active blog where you will be blogging about this project. You need to write at least 2 posts per week. There are some prizes for the winners, which is nice, but for me this is not the most important here.

All my posts will be tagged with “dajsiepoznac” so you can see all of them here: http://www.wlangiewicz.com/tag/dajsiepoznac

This is actually the second edition of this competition, but the previous one took place 5 or 6 years ago, so I couldn’t miss this one.

My Project - Game Arena

My project is inspired by the Lean Poker event, in which I participated during ChamberConf a week ago.

I intent to create a game arena, where you, as a programmer could write your own bot which will play a Poker game (Texas Hold’em). The bots will compete against each other. The idea is that you could setup this session for a weekend and treat it like a code retreat or something similar.

Technical aspectS

This is a overview of what I have to create in next 10 weeks:

  • Texas Hold’em game engine

  • Communication API to talk to the bots

  • Bot process encapsulation + management (probably achieved via docker)

  • Basic UI so you will see how your bot plays the game

  • Page with the ranking for the turnament

I’ll be using Play framework for the application base + akka for communicating with the bots.

Simplifications

Because of very limited time (both for the competition and my own free time), I have to make few very important simplifications

  • Only implement one game (Texas Hold’em)

  • Initially focus only on the bots written in Scala/Java/JVM

  • Initially ignore UI

  • I wanted to implement Blackjack, but it’s not easy to create a meaningful global ranking for this game

BTW: Did you know that I’m available for hire?