Hip Hop Trivia: From Bootcamp jQuery Project to a Game Worth Finishing

The assignment was simple: build something interactive with jQuery and an API. Most people in the bootcamp built weather apps. I built a hip-hop trivia game — because if I was going to spend a weekend debugging event listeners, I wanted the subject matter to keep me engaged.

The original

The first version was rough by any measure. jQuery for everything, no build step, questions hardcoded in a JavaScript array. But it had something that surprised me: a vintage-TV aesthetic that felt genuinely right. A little animated TV set reacted to your answers. Get one correct and the screen lit up. Miss one and the static rolled in.

The questions covered the full breadth of hip-hop history — Rakim, Big Pun, Wu-Tang Clan, Outkast, Missy Elliott. The kind of trivia where you either know it deep or you learn something new. I cared about the subject, so I kept going past the point where most bootcamp projects get abandoned. There's a lesson in that I've applied to every project since.

You can still play the original at triviagame.ulrictodman.com. It's best on desktop, in Chrome or Firefox. Fair warning: the questions are not easy, and the language is rated R.

What a rebuild looks like

The game sat mostly untouched for a few years — which is its own kind of completion. But lately I've been thinking about what it could become, and I've started sketching a rebuild in Angular 19.

The technology goals are clear: remove jQuery, use signal-based state for clean reactivity, add proper routing so each quiz session has a shareable URL. But the more interesting design questions are about the experience: daily challenges that rotate the question set, a multiplayer mode where you and a friend can go head-to-head in real time, content packs organized by era or region or artist.

The aesthetic will stay. The vintage-TV look is the soul of the project — it's the part people remember.

Why keep going back to it

I've shipped projects with bigger teams and bigger budgets than this one. But the trivia game is the project I mention when someone asks what I actually built for fun.

Part of it is the subject matter — hip-hop is a forty-year archive of craft, history, and competition, and there's something satisfying about building a game that takes it seriously. Part of it is the constraint: it's a small enough project that I can hold the whole thing in my head, which makes experimentation cheap.

But mostly it's this: I can tell when I built something people enjoy, and this one people enjoy. That's worth finishing.

The code is on GitHub if you want to look at it, remix it, or contribute questions.