// the find
jakearchibald/wittr
Silly demo app for an online course
Demo app built specifically for Jake Archibald's Udacity offline-first web course. It's a fake Twitter-like app that students progressively enhance with Service Workers, IndexedDB, and background sync. Not a library or tool — it's a teaching artifact.
The two-server setup (app server + config server) is a clever teaching device: the config server lets the course UI simulate network conditions without touching the OS. The service worker skeleton in public/js/sw/ is clean enough to follow without being handed the answers. It's from Jake Archibald, who literally wrote the Service Worker spec explainer, so the patterns aren't cargo-culted. Docker support means students can skip the Node version archaeology.
Last touched in 2020, requires Node v0.12.7 or above — a version from 2015 that's been EOL for nearly a decade, and node-sass is listed as a known pain point (it's notoriously brittle across Node versions). This is a course companion, not a reusable project; if you're not following that specific Udacity course it has essentially no standalone value. No tests. The README troubleshooting section being longer than the setup section tells you something about the dev experience.