Ahoy mateys!
Invite
TL;DR: Come solve 2 problems a day in September 2025 Long Challenge from September 1 through September 7, UTC 5am time.
Each day will feature an easy and a hard(er) problem. The harder problems are Div2 D+ level, so I imagine the contest will have something interesting for most participants. Hope to see you there!
I want to thank speedermen and wery0 for their help testing the problems and the platform. These guys have been a joy to build stuff with; if you see them somewhere, please give them a big upvote!
Meta
A couple weeks back, I posted about vibe coding a programming challenges platform. I was rather happy with the output, so I fine-tuned it further and added some more features:
- Contest message log. No pubsub notifications, just a simple table below the problem list that displays notifications directly from the database. It has automated notifications for e.g. a problem being solved for the first time, and allows me to insert arbitrary messages for e.g. problem statement changes.
- Profile page. You can now pick how you want to be displayed — your GitHub username (if you OAuthed with GitHub), your Google name (if you OAuthed with Google), or Player #1234.
- Groups. I needed some way for users to organize into custom leaderboards, and really tried to avoid copying the corresponding Advent of Code feature — but in the end, it turned out that with my leaderboard architecture it was the only viable option.
In the backend, I fixed a critical database interaction bug (I used an old-school connection pooler instead of pgBouncer, which resulted in stress-tests of any magnitude making the database unavailable for 1 minute), and added metrics through PostHog, which honestly is an amazing tool even on the free tier.
Finally, I picked the domain name — and in my apparent bout of megalomania, I named the platform EldarVerse. In all honesty, it's pretty hard to find .com domains related to puzzles/programming that somebody isn't squatting on, and I didn't want to agonize over the name any longer.
looking forward to it!
also, does the participant have a specific time frame for solving the two daily problems, or how does that work?
The contest will finish exactly 1 week after it starts (so Sep 8, 5am UTC). Every problem can be solved until that deadline — so the first two problems can be submitted for the entire 1 week, the next pair — for the next 6 days, etc. The last 2 problems will only be submittable for 24 hours until the contest ends. Hope it makes sense!
As a tester, the problems are cool!
Besides that, all 14 problems are in Hackercup style (run your program locally and send only the output) which apparently won't happen this year, so here your 2025 Hackercup!
Thank you wery0, and thanks again for testing!
Plez improve color scheme. Eye hurt when load website. Cool website but plez make green less neon. Plez. I can be ur ui/ux designer if you need
Thanks for calling it out! For now, I changed the background to be less pure-black — should reduce the green contrast glare significantly.
Regarding the green color.. it's supposed to create a hackery terminal aesthetic, getting rid of it altogether ruins the whole theme. Do you have a color code suggestion that would preserve the look, but be easier on the eyes?
Probably just a less contrasting green would be better. A little less neon I suppose.
Alright mates, the competition starts in <1 hour. Whoever's not at the ICPC finals, pile on! xD
Day 2 problems drop in <1 hour!
P.S. I'll have to work as a bot until I at least get the platform added to clist.by
P.P.S Currently there are only 30 people who submitted something; surely we can do better together :)
Day 3 problems will be released in 1 hour! Can anyone dethrone Player 1073 today?
Need a warm-up before the online mirror of the ICPC finals? Come solve Day 4 problems on EldarVerse in ~1 hour!
Day 5 problems drop in <1 hour — see you there!
The penultimate day of September challenge is upon us — the new problems will drop in ~1 hour. If you haven't taken part yet, you could start now and solve the first 10 problems as a mini-ACM contest!
Today IMHO features the hardest pair of problems. 500 pointer is one of the most unusual problems I've ever crafted. Anyone looking for a challenge? ;)
Alright friends, the last 2 problems will be released in ~1 hour. By my calculations, anyone can still make the first page if you start now and solve everything :)
As a contestant, the problems were nice (GEOLYMP in particular). Thank you for the contest!