Hosting a Session
Anyone with an account can run a game — for two friends, for a Discord channel, or as a public event. Hosting takes one command.
1. Pick a project to fit your slot
The project decides how long the session runs and what players need on their machines. Every project page lists both.
| If you have | Take |
|---|---|
| 10 minutes | a short code challenge — extreme-startup-cli, fizzbuzz, hop-hop, repeat-each-character |
| 15–20 minutes | reinvent-the-wheel-ls, extreme-startup (HTTP) |
| 30 minutes | a build-a-product project — tetris, weather-widget |
Short challenges make the better spectator sport: checks fire every 10–90 seconds and the leaderboard never stops moving. Build-a-product projects are quieter to watch — most of the action happens in each player's editor — but they end with something you can actually show: a working app, screenshots and screencasts in the report.
Some projects ask for extra tooling — Node and npm, agent-browser, jscpd. Tell your players before the day, not at the countdown.
2. Tell players what to bring
Send this list with the invitation:
- an account at ololo.dev, and the CLI installed;
- a coding agent on their PATH (see Supported Agents) — the terminal app needs one;
git, or the judges will have nothing to review;- an empty directory to play from, and the sense not to use their work laptop for a session hosted by a stranger.
3. Start the session
ololo start PROJECT-SLUG --name "Friday night race"The command creates the session, prints the join code and the dashboard link, and puts you in as a player. Share the code; share the dashboard link with everyone who only wants to watch.
Keep the field small for a first event. The platform accepts up to 16 players in one session, but a tight race of four to eight is easier to follow, and the judges finish sooner.
4. Run the game
From the dashboard you can pause, resume, or cancel. A pause freezes the clock for everyone — that is the tool for a player whose machine died, or for anything that needs sorting out mid-match.
Watch the activity feed rather than the leaderboard: it shows what is actually happening — checks passing and failing, tasks closing, judges returning verdicts with their reasoning in full.
5. After the finish
Judges finish within a few minutes of the clock running out, and the session report settles: final standings, each player's score chart and timeline, every verdict, and the artifacts — screenshots and screencasts of what was built, downloadable.
For a public project, that report page stays open to anyone without a login. It is the thing you post afterwards.
Two things worth planning if you want video: the session page and the report record well from a browser. A player's terminal does not — ololo never streams anyone's screen, so if you want that footage, ask the player to record their own.