Coding Competition Software VS Murphy's Law
Part of the DevOops: Learning from Failure specialist track
Imagine agreeing to develop a full stack web app to host a coding competition for thousands of students. Then standing at a podium in front of a large crowd as your app crashes and you discover that you might be in too deep.
That was my first year of a four year journey of learning to program "properly" and build something robust and useful. The full story includes more spectacular fails, hacking and an eventually an app students loved using to program algorithms that do battle in contests based on game theory. The app is built on React / FastAPI and SQLmodel ORM
Talk sections:
- Introduction to myself and the Victorian Coding Challenge (5 min)
- Journey through 4 platform iterations from Replit and Google sites to AWS / React and FastAPI (10 min)
- Stories about hacks, crashes and making a contest that is at least somewhat immune to chatGPT plagiarism. (10 min)
- Lessons learned and advice on getting things right with testing and data validation. (5 min)
Sanjin is a former computing teacher and an avid fan of Python since 2014. He has a background in developing programming courses and small educational applications for use in schools. As one of the creators of the Victorian Coding Challenge, Sanjin has been building and maintaining a coding competition platform that has hosted quiz-style events, Capture The Flag challenges, and in 2024, agent-based challenges where students program agents to compete in challenges based on game theory.