I participated in a Software Engineering Competition

Back around 2020, I joined a software engineering competition hosted by AlgoExpert. I just happened to stumble upon a video by the CEO, Clement Mihailescu detailing a competition where the winner can win up to $1,000.

Why did I join?

For the money.

Yeah, that amount would’ve been a massive help. Especially at the time, I was still in high school but I did always want an upgrade on my equipment. Even today I’m using a pretty old laptop with just 4gb of RAM. If not for my expertise and the fact that I am using linux, this laptop wouldn’t be able to let me do the things I want such as gamedev.

Did I win?

Nope. But I reckon I did pretty amazing. I mean, I don’t know if the honorable mentions are sorted but I’m pretty high up there, you would see my project in just a few seconds of scrolling.

What was my project?

Well here’s the more interesting details. The theme of the competition was “visualizing algorithms,” and pretty much if I’m going to work on something like that, I might as well work on what I find really interesting.

So, I ended up making a “stable marriage algorithm visualizer” dubbed stmviz. I didn’t use any third-party library or framework and implemented everything from scratch. Pure vanilla javascript, and css. I took around 3-5 days to get everything working and promptly submitted my entry. You could check out the GitHub repository for this project.

A few days after the deadline, Mr. Mihailescu posted another video announcing the winner. I was pretty excited. However, I didn’t win. Well, it was stil a great learning experience and I did enjoy making the visualizer after all.