a movie poster with Santa above a pile of presents. it says, Trouble In Toyland, along with the names of the sponsors, the devs, and the advisors

Illustration: Mark Levy

The prompt: The holidays are upon us and Santa’s elves are behind schedule! Build an app to get the holiday back on track.

Santa’s workshop is in chaos. The drop on the 25th is getting closer by every hour, every day You’ve been brought in as a consultant to help get things back in order. Your job: decide what the cause of the chaos is — then plan and build an app to solve the problem.

The team at Sanity will provide us with a starter dataset and schema giving us some information about Santa’s workshop and content for all the kids in the world (the good, bad, young and old ones) — things like the staff, the inventory, services, etc. — and you can extend or modify that schema as you see fit (or, if you prefer, ignore it entirely and do something else).

Apps must use Sanity as part of the build.

Make new connections and get expert guidance

We’ve set up a dedicated channel in the Learn With Jason Discord called #builder-chat for brainstorming, sharing ideas, and keeping each other accountable.

Find an accountabilibuddy, get expert guidance from the industry professionals, run your idea past Jason and other community members, and listen in to what the rest of the community is cooking up in this open call to kick off the hackathon.

RSVP to add it to your calendar:

The first 5 devs to submit a qualifying app get their choice of gear

The first 5 qualifying apps submitted will receive an item of their choice, up to $150 value, from one of the following sites:

Watch the episode for inspiration

See how Aaron, Charlie, Kent, and Dom tackled the challenge in the latest episode of Web Dev Challenge to jumpstart your own creativity.

The rules and how to submit

If you want to play along, here’s how:

  1. Build a web app that meets the challenge
  2. Spend 30 minutes¹ planning your app
  3. Spend 4 hours¹ building your app
  4. Use Sanity to build your web app
  5. Publish the source code as a public GitHub repo
  6. Publish the web app to a public URL
  7. Submit your web app by 11:59 pm Pacific on Wednesday, January 1, 2025

Submit your web app

Happy building! Let’s have some fun.