1024 Bytes of JavaScript Power

Once again, JavaScript programmers all over the world are being called to show off their skills in a competition. What is the most amazing thing you can program in JavaScript? Here’s the catch, though: you can only use 1 kilobyte of JavaScript code.

The Growing Web

Every single year, the average size of a web page grows and grows. Despite the fact that more and more people have broadband internet, this is a great concern for a few reasons.

1. There are still some people out there using super slow dialup.
2. As mobile internet becomes more popular, we once again are experiencing a seriously slow internet (even though it’s still faster than dialup if you’re not in a wireless dead zone).
3. A lot of mobile data plans have limits on how much data you can download, and even if they don’t, many service providers will throttle people’s speed down to prevent them from hogging all the bandwidth.
4. Your server might have limited bandwidth, so if your pages are huge, then you are limited on the number of pages you can serve.

What Can You Do?

One of the things that grew the quickest in recent years is the amount of JavaScript served on pages. So, as JavaScript programmers we have the responsibility to keep our code lean, without compromising features and performance. This is part of the motivation behind the JS1K competition.

1 kilobyte of JavaScript doesn’t seem like much, especially when you realize that you pretty much can’t find a library out there that is that small, and libraries don’t even do anything by themselves! However, there are still many things you can do with only 1 kilobyte. You can see what others have done within the 1k limit on the demo page, which might give you a bit of inspiration.

Get Involved

You can go here to see the rules, and then you can go ahead and show the world your skills by submitting your own masterpiece. You not only put yourself into a position to possibly win the amazing prizes they are giving to the winners, but you also show others what is possible with so little and inspire the world to work harder to make the internet leaner and faster.

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I myself have considered getting involved, but I know so little about using canvas and I can’t come up with any good ideas anyway. If you have any ideas, leave them in the comments below, but do it quickly because there’s only one week left! Share this with friends and get them involved! I want this to be the best JS1K competition yet, so help spread the desire to be lean and awesome. Happy Coding!