RegExpert

Inspiration

Regular expressions are a part of almost every programming language, and every developer is sure to use them during their careers. However, it remains confusing and challenging to learn. Thanks to new learning tools, learning programming is more fun today than it ever has been. Why can't we bring that experience to RegEx?

What it does

RegExpert is a step-based regular expression learning platform. It is designed to be easy and fun to use, with a simple but snappy UI and lots of bright colors and contrast.

How we built it

We built this to be as minimal as possible. It's a pure React/TypeScript/Tailwind SPA, designed to work offline if packaged as a PWA. The goal is to make practicing RegEx excessible!

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was scope creep. The two of us are very experienced programmers with lots of large projects and professional experience, and we saw the sky as the limit. Optional networked multiplayer (while keeping the rest of the site usable offline) was in our minds from the start, as was fully random questions to ensure RegExpert was infinitely replayable. We quickly realized that this approach led to worsening code quality, and had to rewrite large parts of the UI and logic to keep the site functional and ensure that the core goal (of simplifying RegEx education) was still achieved.

We also ran into challenges with RegEx itself. Parsing RegEx live as the user enters data causes a lot of issues, many of which we were able to solve with error handling. However, invalid RegEx can cause the tab to crash during error handling, which we have not discovered a fix for yet.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm proud of how usable the site is, it's quite snappy and easy to use. I'm pretty happy with the UI overall as well, especially considering the numerous rewrites we undertook over the past day. I think the site accomplishes a large part of our original vision, which is plenty satisfying for our first hackathon.

What we learned

Most importantly, we learned how rushed code can quickly become a nightmare to maintain. In the future, I think we'll definitely take more time to plan things out, even in the inherently rushed hackathon format.

What's next for RegExpert

We'd still like to add optional networked multiplayer and other game elements to the app. We want to see RegEx education be fun instead of dry and painful!

Built With

• daisyui
• react
• tailwind
• typescript
• vite