Question

I might be doing a coding competition soon, I was wondering if anyone made one and what where the guidelines/ process.
I’d like to make the competition appealing to all devs, and I m trying to come up with ideas as to how.
the scenario is: There is an event running and we(of the coding competition) will have a room that we can use (either to code or for questions, etc), however, ideally the task for the competition should be assignet and they should eb able to go and do other things, if they are so inclined.
what i wonder is what kind of challenges to give, and most importantly, what is the criteria to “win” teaching and learning good coding standards takes a looong time, and I d like to think that if you ve been coding for longer you ll do things right and quick… but in a competition, you would be cutting corners…
I would really appreciate your input on this

Answer 1

Guidelines

Limit the languages which can be submitted. If you don’t, you may get proprietary languages which require a special purchased compiler or some other inconvenience.

Correctness

This is easy. Provide an easy-to-read unit test in all languages you will accept. This will allow simple, automatic testing of submissions, and will guide the interface of the solution.

Challenges

Create a theme. Make it focused, but not too specific as to require certain paradigms or language features. Then develop challenges based around that theme.

Assign points to each challenge. Give more points to more difficult problems. Be sure to review each challenge carefully and have a team attempt them before giving points so you can make a more accurate decision.

As @miorel mentioned in his answer, time limits and memory limits are wonderful. Set a time limit per test per challenge, or at least monitor them and have these metrics contribute to the points given for solving the problem.