How I hacked the vote at Chrome Dev Summit

Puppeteering for fun and outerwear

I wouldn’t say I have a problem. I have an inclination. I like to take things apart and change how they work. As a kid I’d stay on the computer all night poking at bits in memory trying to change a program’s behavior. Most programs would just break. Sometimes you’d hit the right bit and be rewarded with infinite cash in a computer game.

Fast forward a few decades and this inclination led to a career in software development and web security. Websites are perfect for the curious. You can view source code, inspect every request, and tweak an app live via the dev tools. As an application developer, it’s a nightmare. But that’s a different post.

Last November, Google hosted its annual Chrome Dev Summit, a conference by web developers for web developers. It’s a beautiful event put on by brilliant people. Google’s top developer advocates emceed the event and kept the audience engaged between talks.

The conference celebrated web features released over the last year and emerging tech that everyone could look forward to. The emcees embraced that theme with an interactive game, the Big Web Quiz, that pitted each feature up against another in a battle of…