A jar of candy

Since today there is a jar of candy on the home page, next to the header. You click it and draw a flavour with a short message from me. Every now and then a candy is golden, and then the page does something silly: it freezes, flips upside down or starts a disco.

There is more under the hood than it looks. The draw happens on the server, behind an invisible captcha and rate limits, so nobody can pump the counter with a script. I also have a small Android app with two widgets (last candy and leaderboard) and notifications when someone draws something. One person clicking fifty times will not flood my phone: their later draws quietly update a single notification.

The texts took the longest. The first version had ten messages per flavour and almost all of them were about code. Now there are five, and they are about candy. Until November 2nd the jar also has two Halloween flavours.