Okay, we're nearly there. Final speaker of the day. We're going to bring on Andrew, who is Community Manager at Battlesnake. I guess quite a lot of people don't know what Battlesnake is. I do, because it's the kind of silly stuff I like doing, but I got playing with it. Hopefully it'll be a fun one to end the day. I'd say it's probably interesting for Node-RED users perhaps as well, and the mission of Battlesnake, but the kind of idea of teaching people to code because a lot of people coming into Node-RED who certainly don't come from a coding background and a structuring background, so hopefully this will give them some food for thought on how just to play and learn. Some of us learn better by playing. Anyway, I'll bring the slides up. There we go, and over to you. All right, fantastic. So thank you so much, everybody, for sticking around until the bitter end. I'm super excited to be here today to kind of close things off here at Node-RED Con, talking about Node-RED, Battlesnake, and how you can use these two spectacular technologies to try to level up your flow and become a better programmer. So to kick things off, I just want to give a little TLDR on what this whole talk is going to be about for anybody who's like, ah, it's the very end of the day. So as I'm sure you all know, it's often pretty difficult for developers to find practical ways to explore new tech. Side projects are often used and can help, but they're really often kind of boring, intimidating, and lonely to work on. But don't worry, there is a better way, and that's what we're going to be talking about in our talk today. So a couple things we're going to be covering. Learning pathways for
So, traditional learning pathways, challenges to those existing pathways, a different approach to learning, why Battlesnake and Node-RED kind of fit together as this amazing pairing. And then we're actually going to do a practical demo. If everything goes okay, everything goes well, we're going to get a practical demo in here as well. So, first things first, start things off. Sam introduced me a little bit, but a little bit more. My name is Andrew McLean. I'm the community manager for Battlesnake Inc. I'm going to talk a little bit in the next slide about what Battlesnake is, but then we'll spend some time a bit later. I'm a co-founder of High Tech U, a university-based boot camp for teenagers to learn software development skills. I'm also a middle school science and technology educator, and I consider myself a novice web developer. I'm new to the learning journey. I've been learning for a decade or more, but always consider myself a novice in learning new things. And so, exactly what Sam said. Not everybody's coming into this as a trained developer, and I certainly fall into that camp. And if you're interested in connecting with me, there's my details there. You can also find me on LinkedIn. So, what is Battlesnake? Because I know if I don't tell you now, you're going to wait until the end and be like, what is this Battlesnake thing? So, Battlesnake is a multiplayer programming game where your code is the controller. If you recognize this thing on the right-hand side, this is both Battlesnake and something you may have seen in another life before, especially if you used to play the old Snake game on Nokia phones. So, Battlesnake is taking that concept and turning it into a programming game. So, each Battlesnake is controlled by a live web server. Battlesnakes move independently. They try to find food, avoid hazards, and stay alive as long as possible to be the final Battlesnake standing. And so, we're going to look at exactly what that means.
for everybody in terms of learning in just a couple of minutes. But I want to get started in terms of our actual talk on this learning pathway bit with a bit of a conversation and a question to everybody around how developers are often learning about new technologies. And so you can throw these things in the chat if you want to. I think I can see the chat. I can see the chat if you've got some ideas. But I know there's a little bit of a lag between this. So I'll pause for just a second and throw it to people. What are some ways that developers are often learning new tech? All right, so we got some answers that are coming in. But in terms of ways that developers are often learning new tech, there's sort of three big ways. Site projects are a big way, online courses, as well as coding challenges. Now, the downside is these three ways that are often being used in learning new technologies. Site projects are often intimidating. Online courses can be lonely. And code challenges are often really, really limited in scope. And I think all of those sort of intimidating, lonely, limited in scope ties into all of these different sort of traditional learning pathways. But don't worry, there is another way. So built by developers for developers, Battlesnake aims to break the cycle of developer despair, creating an innovative learning sandbox for experienced devs. So this stuff that I'm talking about with Battlesnake ties in so closely with Node-RED that you can kind of use the two technologies really interchangeably. But when I talk about the cycle of developer despair, what do I mean? So you want to learn a new technology. So you start a site project. And this site project is difficult to start. It's only to work on, or it's focusing not on.
quite on the way that you want to get there, and those end up going nowhere. And then you kind of repeat that cycle. So Battlesafe kind of sets to break that cycle. And you can see like Battlesafe fits in this really interesting space in terms of sort of developer learning experience in that you've got a lot of things. So slide projects and open source projects and 2doMVC are often really introductory. And while they're really open-ended, they're kind of, they're fairly basic. Now, when you go into more, you can go into more prescriptive learning that you have a little bit more direction if you're learning. So you've got things like online courses and interview prep and coding puzzles. And then if you want to get more technical experience, so if you're a professional developer, you already know a lot of these things, that's where you move into this idea of sort of competitions and coding games and conferences and NIC books and blogs. But again, those are very prescriptive. So Battlesafe kind of fits in this really unique spot. And I think Node-RED does that. It's very self-directed, but also allows for you to cover a level of technical expertise that is far beyond the basics. All right, so how could developers be learning new tech and how does Node-RED and Battlesafe fit into this? So Battlesafe can kind of show that it fits in that space, but there's some specific features of both Node-RED and Battlesafe that make it kind of a really great stack for learning new technology. So both Battlesafe for learning Node-RED and Node-RED for learning Battlesafe. So first thing, collaborative. As well as sort of all being very open source. So Battlesafe, a lot of the things and a lot of the things we'll be looking at today are very open-ended as well, but open-ended and open source, and definitely that's a big piece here. And accessible.
engaging, accessible to developers of all skill levels, whether you're an experienced developer or you are a new developer that's just getting into this world and wanting to explore new technologies. So how we know that this is the thing that works, this sort of world of collaborative, open-ended, and accessible learning sandboxes and tools and platforms. Well, we have statements like this. This was actually from one of our super users on the BattleSnake platform. So they use code BattleSnake as a way to learn algorithms and techniques and technologies, which is great. And then we've also over the years seen a huge number of devs that are sort of indicating that they're learning about new platforms, languages, and tools through our platform. So obviously some platforms that are there and then some really cool strategies and techniques that apply both in the world of BattleSnake and then more broadly in the technology space as well. All right. So we're going to get into a demo in just a minute that will be kind of showcasing this amazing way that Node-RED and BattleSnake can work together. But to get started, I actually want to give you a run through of how BattleSnake actually works. So as I said before, it's a multiplayer programming game. This is actually how the system works. So the BattleSnake board is requesting from your web server that you're creating. So as a developer, you are building out a BattleSnake, which is a web server, a really simple one. And our game engine is sending requests to your server. So our game engine is sending a GET and POST requests. And what we're doing is at the end of the day, sending some information about the game board and the state that it's in. And then your server, your BattleSnakes are responding in up to 500 milliseconds with one.directions to move, either left, right, up, or down. The stack that you use, the technology, everything that wasn't discussed here is because it's very open-ended. You can use whatever technology stacks, whatever languages you want, language agnostic, platform agnostic, but at the end of the day, as long as you can create a web server with the technology, and you can return a response up, down, left, or right, then you can play the game. Here's a brief overview. This is the Battlesnake API. It's kind of a reverse API because you're building the web server that Battlesnake Game Engine is talking to, but here's the important things you need to know. We've got these four endpoints. That is going to be more clear as we get into the demo in just a minute. Here is what you'll be getting if you are looking at a get response to that base URL. You're going to receive an empty request from the game engine, and you're going to respond with this awesome JSON that's here. This JSON, the color, we'll give you the color, the head and tail, we have customized head and tails. This JSON is going to make your Battlesnake look like this. The other really important one is the post request. When a post request comes through, you're going to receive a game ID, how large the board is, the turn number, Battlesnake locations, all the rest of that stuff. Like I said before, you're just going to be responding with either up, down, left, or right based on the information you receive. Let's jump into a live coding tutorial. We've got about 10 minutes left, which is perfect. What we're going to be using today is a repository that I've open-sourced that I've made available for everybody. This is a wrapper for deploying a Node-RED-based Battlesnake into a platform called Railway. Railway is a great alternative to Heroku, now that Heroku is basically...
out their free tiers. If you are interested in checking this out, the link to the repository is at the bottom there, and you can also follow along. But we're actually going to go and show you what that looks like in a second. But before we do that, I want to send out some huge acknowledgments to some of the amazing open-source developers that contributed to the code that has ultimately become this new Railway Quickstart. The top two there have contributed some of the open-source logic that's used in the more advanced Battlesnake, and then both IBM, Atsushi, and Sam, the one and only Sam, contributed to the sort of base of this, which was a Node-RED Heroku wrapper that I just kind of converted into a Railway wrapper to make it nice and easy to start. So, let's jump over into our repo. So, I'm going to get that open right now. So, if you come over here, we've got a Deploy to Railway button set up there and ready to go. And this is going to be the experience you're going through. So, you're going to get your GitHub. We're going to actually do all of this in real time and hope that it goes fast enough for us. And thanks to Sam, all of these environment variables are already set up. So, we're going to click Deploy. And now, it becomes a little bit of a waiting game. This will take a couple of minutes to get started. And so, what I'm going to do is I'm going to pull up what you'll get once you have successfully deployed your project onto Railway. And what's great about Railway is this is putting your server, obviously, a lot of us do our development on Node-RED and localhost. This is putting it up in a web server with a password and a login. So, you're ready to go without having to use any extra nodes like ngrok or anything like that. So, you can see that our new Battlesnake Node-RED wrapper is building right now. But I've already got one built.
and up and running, and this is what you would see if you went to that, the domain that is produced, the URL that's produced by this Node-RED server once you go. And if you look at this, you might say that looks very similar to what we saw over on our initial get request, and that's because it absolutely is. So let's jump into our Node-RED editor and see what's going on. And, oh, amazing, we have successfully built, so I'm actually gonna use this one, which is throwing an error because there's a little bug with this where you need to reset it a couple of times just to populate the database initially. But once I've done that, I'm gonna leave here, I'm gonna leave here, I'm gonna leave here, and we're gonna go to this, there we go again, and so exactly what we had before. So let's head over to the editor, and we're just gonna go, we've set this up already. So we're gonna head over to the editor, and you'll notice here, we have our username and password set up, and just as you might imagine, we're looking for a great username, very secure, battle, and our password is snake, and we're gonna log in here to Node-RED. Amazing, so you'll notice this if you've set up a new Node-RED instance, this is sort of the tutorial that you get, but what we have actually put into this initial flow that has been created in here is taking some amazing work that Sam had already done, adding a few more documents so you kind of know what's going on in a little bit more of a meaningful way. So if we go back to what we were seeing over here in that main domain there, so this is telling the Battlesnake game engine what your Battlesnake looks like. So we're gonna head over and actually create a new Battlesnake really quickly, and we're gonna head into build from scratch.
We're going to create a name. I'm going to call this our node-red-battlesnake. And we're going to toss in that same URL that is giving us this JSON and toss it right into the URL. We'll set everything except the one thing we want to do is add a node-red tag in there. Awesome. Save that. And here we go. So, we've got our node-red-battlesnake set up there. You'll see the latency is there. Our node-red-battlesnake is in and working. But maybe I want my battlesnake to be a more intimidating color and maybe a more intimidating head or tail. So, what I'm going to do is come back over into our empty GET request, which is where all of our battlesnake customizations are stored. And just using the basic HTTP in, HTTP out, and our template nodes here, we're going to change our head to lanternfish. We're going to leave our tail as is, but I want to make it intimidating. So, I'm going to set the color as jetblack. And we're going to save that. We're going to do a deploy. And then we're going to head back over to here. We should see an update. But more importantly, if we go back over to the platform, we are going to see it refresh here and update. And there we go. Now we've got our lanternfish head. We've got a jetblack. And then we've got our default tail. So, we've updated our metadata there. Now, you've got a battlesnake in here. We talked about those other, the move endpoint. So, we want our game engine to talk to our move endpoint. Let's see what that looks like. So, we're going to head over here to our create game. We're going to create a custom game. And we're going to find our Node-RED battlesnake, add it onto our map. Awesome. And we are going to see what happens. So, I'm going to press play, start our first game. And you can see that I'm getting a response here, bad HTTP status code. And that's because you may have noticed I had a few things disabled over here in our flow. Some of our flows.
the nodes are actually disabled. Obviously, our Git is telling our Battlesnake game engine what a Battlesnake looks like, and allows us to use some really default nodes that are in there. Our start and end, those are really just there for allocating and deallocating resources, which isn't super important for us when you're just getting started with Battlesnake, but some useful things to have in there. But what we're going to do is start to look at these move requests. First thing I'm going to do is I'm going to enable these requests here, and let's just go enable these selected nodes, and I'm going to deploy that. Now, if I head back over and create a rematch, my error should be gone because now there's something actually going on at that move endpoint. There we go. We're still going up, but we're not getting the same error. Now, we're getting a response was not received. That makes sense because we weren't actually sending any information in this node, but we were actually, in our debug, collecting some information about the game. I'm going to rerun this one one more time just to show what this looks like, and I cleared the debugging. Awesome, so we had that error, but we were still getting our information about the game and what was going on to make our decisions. Now, we need to send a move, and we're going to get started with sending a really basic move into here, and I'm going to disable these again. Awesome, and I'm going to enable the next step, which is setting a move, and we're going to enable those. Perfect, and we're going to deploy that and clear that. Now, we don't have any debugs set up here. Our message payload isn't going anywhere, so we shouldn't have anything that shows up in debug, but we should see our snake be able to move now because we've added this change node in here, and we've set our payload move to right. So if everything goes well, our snake should go right this time. We'll be creating a rematch.Let's see what happens. If everything goes right, no errors, and our Battlestick has gone right just with that single change node in there. We're going to go back and go into our node again. We're going to set our move to left and done, deploy, and head back over, create a rematch. Let's play. It should go left this time. We'll do one more. Let's change it to down and deploy. Awesome. Down and deploy, done, deploy. Now our next game should have him going down and deploying. Amazing. The last thing we need to do in here, especially when you're just getting started, is you want to have that logging so you can see what's going on. If I disable these nodes really quickly and enable these final nodes, our debugging, let's enable and enable selected nodes. Let's deploy this. Now, if we go in here, we should be playing a new game. Amazing. We're going right, which is what we want to do. You'll see some messages. You can see the decision, the game data, and then the decision that's coming from there. There's one final node in here that I'll leave for you to explore once you go in here and use the Node-RED Railway starter. That's some more advanced Battlestick logic. You can see we've got a few more nodes in there, but we're about a couple seconds from being away. I'm going to jump up here really quickly. If you are looking to get involved in Battlestick, check it out. We set up a code, Node-RED-Con, coming to you. If you're interested in learning more about Battlestick, you can check out play.battlestick.com.
Here's all of our social stuff. Now, I'll turn it over for questions. Thanks, everybody. Hopefully, you'll be exploring Node-RED with Battlesnake and Battlesnake with Node-RED soon. Cool. Thank you, Andrew. Awesome. Sorry, I was just sneaking my... I've been loading up my Battlesnake flow. I haven't done it for a while. I love it. I didn't keep up as much this year, so I need to make some changes. I don't think it's fun. It doesn't handle the new maze mode and stuff. We haven't got any questions yet. Maybe I'll just bring mine onto the stream. This is the last version of... It's called Node-A-Conda-RED. You can see, it can get quite addictive. This is the incoming move here. There's quite a lot of function nodes in here. I'm doing quite a lot in JavaScript. I've got some stuff doing the obvious stuff. Function to avoid the walls, avoid the snakes, avoid head-to-heads. My versioning was each one in a new tab. I've slowly built it up. I've got tabs like go to food, avoid corner, escape deep hole. This one's called aggression. I can't change that to make it more aggressive. I love that. I've definitely found that Node-RED has opened a door. I've been in the Battlesnake world for years. It wasn't until discovering Node-RED that I've been able to build out a functional Battlesnake in a quick period of time. They work so well together.
deploy, especially when you're running on something like Railway, that change build deploy cycle with traditional code is a lot slower, you don't have that instant gratification, whereas here, in eight minutes, you deploy four different versions of your snake. That was really quite cool. We've got one question from Pablo. Are there team competitions? Absolutely. Yes, there's a couple of things. Obviously, developers may be going in here to explore new technology, so there's just running the games like I run them. There's also challenges that you can run that are really basic challenges that work your way through some set game modes of don't run into the ball, don't hit other snakes, follow food. Then we have our leagues, which are competitive leagues that happen three or four times a year. Then we also have this new feature that is a tournament feature, so you can access a beta feature here and run your own tournament within your company. We have a lot of companies that are saying, we're doing a hack day, we're really interested in using something new to engage our developers and learning this new tool. We actually will grant access to developers to access that new beta feature. A private tournament, cool. I was just thinking, yes, obviously, you compete in the leagues or in the tournaments for different levels. I think we did well in the 2021 ones. I think I got into the playoffs and things with a Node Red, so a low-code snake, it was the first one. What I'm just thinking, the issue is nobody's done anything where you've got snakes cooperating yet, but that's actually very interesting. There was a classic mode that used to exist and doesn't anymore, which was where you actually completed a squads game. Basically, you had to code against other teams, but then you were not able to dive.
you ran into snakes that were on your team. So it allows me to do that collaborative style in there. Yeah, so it's been done, but we pulled it away and I have a feeling it'll come back very soon. I'm thinking about the idea of having two sets, what looks like two separate battle snakes, but then sort of communicating by the back channel as well. To hang off or something. Absolutely, and I think the great thing about BattleSnake and Node-RED as well is there's so many use cases that are there. Somebody years ago created a BattleSnake that was hand controlled. So back when we hadn't had the 500 millisecond, somebody had built out this hand control that you could go faster than the one millisecond time out of the time period. People have done a face controlled snake where you respond to machine vision. Yeah, so it's really cool things. Yeah, no, absolutely. And yeah, it's really cool to see that railway build for, well, so it's really, it's a Node-RED runtime for railway, and then you've added in the BattleSnake example flow there. Exactly, exactly. I'll take a look at that and maybe we can do something to wrap that up into a, I also notice it probably needs updating because it's Node-RED 2, which is still supported, but we really should get that up to Node-RED 3 at some point. Awesome, awesome. Cool, well, I'm just seeing if we've got any more questions. So we'll give it a second, but I think we're probably getting towards the end of the day. I think Nick's here to, Nick, do you want to join? Join on? Without, without one. So you finally see what that BattleSnake thing, I think, was going on about last year, wasn't it? Absolutely. Every, every daily stand-up was like, oh, my snake's been doing this. So what do you think, Nick? Is it going to be a Nick versus Sam Node-RED BattleSnake? I feel like Node-RED needs to be at the top of that leaderboard for the rest of time. Yeah, no, absolutely. It's, my mind is currently racing, and I need to put those thoughts to one side so I can talk coherently for the last few moments of today's stream. But no, it looks really cool. And more seriously, I think there's, we've, we get lots of questions with Node-RED in more.
settings. People often say, oh, you know, it's like Scratch, and Scratch is much more accessible to a much younger audience. Node-RED. I like to think Scratch is for the, I was going to say primary school, but for the international audience. Scratch is great for up to, like, your 11-, 12-year-olds. Then they tend to move on to Python and the like. But Node-RED also sits nicely in that space as well. But it's the activities. You've got to have the activities that engage. And it's all good having a really good proto-environment, a language that might be, but it's the activities. It's what you do with it. That's what really engages people. You don't learn Node-RED for the sake of learning Node-RED. But yeah, I just love the whole concept of BattleSnake. My mind is racing for what we can do. I do agree, the fact that in eight nodes, basically, you're able in a flow to build a functional thing, I think speaks to that really basic feature of this block-based programming, low-code environment. So, totally agree. And thank you so much for letting me close off the conference today, Sam and Nick. Cool. Thanks very much, Adrian. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. Cheers, bye.