We heard that some development shops have an interview exam where they ask interviewees to create a Minesweeper clone in an hour, or maybe it was two hours, we’re not totally sure. After talking about it a bit with the team, debating whether it was easy or hard, whether it could be done or not, I decided to try.

I recorded the whole thing as a screencast. I’ve sped it up about 6x and narrated it in editing to make it a bit more interesting. I’m hoping this gives non-developers a good peek at what it’s like to develop an HTML 5 single page web-app….

HTML 5 Minesweeper in an Hour Screencast from Stone Ward on Vimeo.

The end result is pretty rough. There’s no score, not much styling, and the end game requires a browser reload to get started on your next game. But, the elements are there, and it’s playable.

Grab the source code from GitHub, or give it a try.