Bug Bounty

Debug Quest is level 2 of GDG RCCIIT's debugging contest: a Halloween-themed website broken on purpose. Contestants find the bugs in nine challenge cards, raise an issue for each and send the fix as a pull request. I built the whole site, bugs included, in plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

First- and second-year students rarely practise debugging, or the GitHub routine of forking, issues and pull requests, on an actual project. A contest needs a codebase that is broken in ways worth finding, playable in a browser, and small enough to read in an evening.

• →Nine broken challenge cards: each broken in its own way, with a score out of ten.
• →A page that fights back: fake alerts, a blackout every 15 seconds, ghosts, sounds and a cursor trail hiding the real bugs.
• →The Halloween theme: glitches, distortions, a potion bottle with rising bubbles, and sound effects.

• →No framework, no build step. A first-year could open the files in any editor and run the site in a browser.
• →The fix goes through GitHub. Contestants raised issues and opened pull requests, so the contest taught the workflow it was meant to teach.

• →Contestants found the bugs, raised issues and opened pull requests to fix them.