Weekend code warriors prepare to clash in Codewarz

If you didn't have any weekend plans yet—or maybe even if you did—and you're interested in scratching your programming itch, there's something to add to your calendar. Codewarz, a programming competition that presents participants with 24 coding challenges, is running its first live event starting at 1pm Eastern on November 18 and ending at 9pm on November 20.

This is not a hacking competition—it’s strictly coding. Participants can use their language of choice as long as it's one of the 15 supported by the event: the various flavors of C, Python, Node.js, Scala, PHP, Go, Ruby, and even BASH. (Sorry, no one has asked them to support ADA or Eiffel yet.) There's no compiling required, either. Each submitted solution is run in an interpreted sandbox on a Linux machine for evaluation and scoring. And the challenges run the gamut from beginner (things like text parsing, math and basic networking) to advanced (more advanced parsing and math, hashing, cryptography, and forensics challenges).

Scoring is straightforward. Each of the challenges has an expected output (checked through hash-matching), and matching that output equals success for whatever number of points a challenge is worth. The easiest challenges (such as a "Hello World" tutorial challenge) are worth 10 points, while the hardest are worth 250 points.

Code gets submitted through the event's website as a text file, and limited information is presented if it fails to hit the target other than compilation errors. "We do not give users specific output as to where their solution went wrong if it's not correct," said one of the administrators, who goes by the Twitter handle @funtimes_ninja. The other administrators are @ryko212, ohai_ninja, and ehlo_nazwadi.

Codewarz began as a competition run on-site at colleges and events, including events for US Military Academy and Augusta University. The four administrators are all members of the US Army, but Codewarz itself is done in their spare time and is not connected to the military. In fact, you can't use a .mil address to register for the competition (because DOD blocks their mail provider).

Registration for the event gets you an invitation to the Codewarz Slack channel, where someone is bound to point you in the right direction—and where a Slack bot alerts the group each time an entry is posted during competition.