Every year, my family hosts an Oscar party. We print out ballots of all the nominees, and each of us makes our selections. During the broadcast, we follow along and see who guessed right. But there was always a couple points of friction in this. First, nobody remembers everybody's guesses. And second, it's hard to keep track of everyone's current score. This made for a lot of yelling, "who got that?!" and "who's in the lead now?!". So, I made an app that would answer all these questions and more.
▸ Sign-up for new players
▸ Easy sign-in using numeric PIN
▸ View other players' selections
▸ Highlights correct selections
▸ Make selections, when signed in
▸ Highlights winning nominees (once known)
▸ Calculates and highlights winning player
▸ Sorts players by score
I wanted signing in to be simple. But since this app would be sitting on the public web, I also needed it to be secure. My solution was to combine two levels of security. First, the entire app is locked with a public/private key. A user needs a magic link, which stores the public key in a cookie, to gain write access. Second, user accounts are locked with a 4-digit PIN. This is enough security to keep out other family members but is simple enough to make signing in a breeze.