chess.dev is now a thing.

What is it?

You can write a whole chess engine in JavaScript and make it join tournaments against other small engines to see how it performs. The purpose is learning and not actually writing engines that will be used by players for analysis, so it’s kind of like leetcode in a sense.

Why?

There are a lot of engine competition websites, for example, there’s the one from chess.com. The issue with these is that there’s no easy way to create a simple engine and see how it performs against other simple engines. Instead, you have to first build a cutting-edge or near cutting-edge engine, then ask to have your engine included in the competition or hope someone notices it. If you are just creating a small engine for fun or learning, you likely are not going to do all that.

chess.dev tailors for this use case: small engines by people interested in learning.

As a bonus, it has small prizes and it runs weekly.