The Odd First Place
On February 24th (or last Saturday), I joined a live coding competition over at Jakarta Convention Center which was held during the IIETE exhibition. There were two categories: the live Python coding competition, and the Roblox game making thingy.
December last year, one of my friends told me about this event. They talked about the game making category, so I wasn’t that interested. After all, I lost a game making competition held last year by the very same event organizer 😒 However, last month, my other (online) friend talked about this competition again. They said that they’re joining the software development category of the competition. So then, I actually looked for more information about this competition.
Stricter than Your Average Exam
I got directed to their guidelines. Apparently, it’s a live coding competition! You will be given the prompt during the competition day. And, you have to use Python—which is still ehhhh but that’s 25x better than a Scratch competition or something.
I then registered for the competition. A week before the event, they sent us the competition guidelines.
There’s one catch though: It was SOOO stupidly strict 💀 You’re not allowed to use any “IDEs” other than IDLE, no reading code documentations, no opening apps other than IDLE, no installing packages through pip, and so on. I wasn’t even allowed to scratch out my code structure IN A PAPER! AND.. NO FILE MANAGERS ARE ALLOWED! NO TERMINALS EITHER..
Now, don’t get me wrong, that definitely makes everything more fair—because here at Indonesia, you really cannot trust anyone. But then again, the fact that you are not allowed to open anything other than IDLE is like, what.. And let’s just say that I kinda went against the rules by opening a color picker for my GUI app (I do not have the skills to just imagine a color and its hex code), but COME ON. WHO CAN LIVE IN IDLE? I don’t even want to call it an IDE cuz it doesn’t even have a built-in file explorer.
But did that turn me down? Nah. Good coding competitions are hard to find here, and I knew well that I’m gonna have some chance to win there thanks to my OK Python skills.
My Precognition™ (You’ll Get it Later)
Coding Bee (this competition’s organizer) had informed us about the competition theme early on in the guidelines, so I have already thought of what they could possibly ask us to make.
And my guess?
2 hours + education theme + Python + middle school = a todo app!
And since their guidelines mentioned UI/UX as part of the judging criteria, I quickly turned to find a good GUI toolkit (who on earth likes the CLI here? The judges are probably not UNIX nerds). I decided to go with CustomTkinter because the people there seems to like Tkinter (I’ve watched their coding competition final video before and somebody there used it.. so uh) but it looks way better than the vanilla Tkinter.
So now, I have the complete studying strategy. I speedran learning CustomTkinter and tried to code a basic to-do app.
The Competition Day
My parents took me to Jakarta Convention Center as they also want to visit one of my relatives’ house for.. I think it was a (Chinese) lantern festival celebration thingy, I don’t know. It was already crowded when I arrived. Oh, and I met my teacher and a junior of mine HAHAHA. I asked if he could be my accompanying person and he agreed (this was outside of a school agreement lol).
I got there just in time for the registration. I quickly grabbed my nametag and went inside the building.
I then went to stage A of the exhibition. And then I realized it was the wrong stage so I moved to the B stage and I found the coding stage. The workplace was very comfortable, actually. Each of their table was shared for 3 people.
After the opening session, the competition began.
The Real Show
Now for the prompt:
It was..
It was……..
It was………………
Yeah, a to-do app.
I laughed so hard the people at my desk asked why I giggled.
I got two hours to complete my code which was EXTREMELY short for me (I wonder why, maybe because I used the most uncomfortable Python text editor on earth?). I spent the first hour just working on my app’s layout because damn, things are hard without intellisense. But my code studies helped me so much because I literally already know what to do (pun??) 😭 But my heart was already pounding like crazy so I couldn’t really code like how I usually do.
I did get my app working though, BUT it was REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY BAD. Okay not THAT bad, but it has a really serious bug where I couldn’t even delete my proper to-do’s. Sometimes the archive button works, other times my app would just throw an index out of range error. And then, I wanted to assign a unique color for each tag but that didn’t seem to work. My app would just make a new tag with a new color every time I add a new task.
The Announcement
The commitee decided to delay the announcement from 1 PM to 3 PM. That’s an extra 2 hours which was way out of my plan (or everybody’s plan, rather)! My parents couldn’t wait that long. But because I had my teacher, I asked if I could take his taxi back to our school after the announcement and he agreed 😄
And then
I won yay
IDK HOW I GOT FIRST PLACE
LIKE
WHAT 💀
Okay but how? Either I’m actually not a bad programmer or I am the best out of all the bad programmers? 😭 I don’t know, they ignored my bug? I think I got a 10/30 for my error handling 😭💔
By the way, you can get my source code here
Thank You
For making my journey 100 times more fun there: Kraafter
A Note
I do not hate IDLE. It works.. as a basic Python IDE—and that’s it. However, it’s wayyy too minimal for me. I am too used to using Intellisense and all those goodies.