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by mglinski 5097 days ago
{"success":true,"message":"Thanks for playing! In the meanwhile, why don't you share your achievement on FB + Twitter and help us spread the good word? Head over to the 'url' parameter.","url":"http://ecommercehackday.com/share,totalTime:260 seconds"}

Eating pizza makes coding double hard for me, I should have had less then 3 mins for that puzzle, but I just don't think this was even remotely hard enough of a puzzle to weed out people for serious eCommerce development/hacking? Submit a few HTTP requests and you pass the tests? Besides filtering out people who don't know jQuery and console.log, I don't think this was a very good test/quiz for what they are looking for. I think they should be looking for the people who can create these simple puzzles from scratch in X time instead of the people who can solve them.

2 comments

I used 1.5 minutes, but I spent probably 30 seconds or more starting the text editor and opening a custom html document with the form values.

It has to be said that I had already made tools for converting the two first challenges :-)

I think they should have added some additional puzzles like fixing a bug in a JavaScript function or something, but it is a good way of making sure that the free tickets goes to someone that has some experience.

You can really solve this in a number of different ways... jQuery is just the easiest way because I've included a basic snippet there...

The puzzle part was merely a way to weave out people who can't even figure out basic documentation, and disrupt the workflow of those who can during hackathons...

Yea, as I read through the comments here I understood that was the idea. It's just I was expecting something more.... substantial to get "invited" to a hackathon, especially if you only know my email address and that I can construct valid HTTP requests in the language/program of my choice. For example, not including the jQuery library in the source code would have been better imo, so we would at least have to problem solve a little. Just my thoughts, I wish I could go to something like this but I can't so I am just complaining here instead :)
Guess I came late to the party. There was no jquery there when I did it and the fun thing I learned was I could load jquery from the console.
Oh I like this! Good idea. Removing jQuery now...
So I solved the puzzle about an hour ago and received an email within about 5 minutes after finishing it. When I went to register for the event though, there was no option to sign up as developer/hacker. The field only has N/A next to it on the event brite page.

Is it supposed to be like that?

no you didn't get the real invite. It will come later today or over the weekend. It will be a ticket, not a sign up.
I jQuerify'd it
I learned you can use curl with session cookies from this little challenge. Yeah, you probably don't need to be an elite hacker to solve it, but it's still a pretty cool way to give out invites...