Competition

The first stage had 965 contestants in the JS track. I advanced to the second stage, which included only 256 contestants.

After that, I passed to the final round, narrowing down to just 16 people, and was invited to VK's office in Moscow.

The Task

We were tasked with building a web server in pure Node.js that would:

1. Query a large JSON 'database' of emails via API.
2. Serve a fast web app to display these emails according to a Figma template.

Later, we were asked to add extra features such as filters, color themes, and internationalization (i18n).

My Implementation

At the time, I wasn't familiar with any frontend frameworks, so I used vanilla JavaScript. In retrospect, this likely contributed to the app's high performance.

It was basically my first real project: I had no clue about what NodeJS was, and I had no idea how a web server worked. I had to learn everything from scratch, but my hope to pass the round again and again led to success.

Below is a demonstration of the flexibility of the theme system.

You can view my full implementation on GitHub.