I was working on ICPC Asia Jakarta since 2023 edition, and 2024 edition introduced a lot of quality of life (QoL) improvements. I hope that both judges and participants can enjoy the competition.
One of contestant's mascot, featuring Gawr Gura
2024 edition ICPC badge
Prior to 2023, technical stuffs was managed by the competition host. In 2023, I tried to improve DOMJudge deployment workflow to make it reproducible, thus more resistance to deployment failure. I also observed the whole competition, including the preparation, contestant workstation, and post-competition reports. Based on all gathered data, I sorted them out and created a roadmap of improvements.
Starting from August 2024, I volunteered myself (again) as a technical committee in this competition. I was responsible to do the following:
- Deploying competition system (DOMJudge).
- Improving contestant workstation.
Since DOMJudge deployment scripts reproducibility has already improved in 2023 edition, I tried to improve the system to make it more resilience and observable, so better decision can be made in dire needs. This kind of improvements take a long journey, as technical team need to learn about the app thoroughly.
Knowing the fact that our competition host already have existing contestant workstation setup, we just need to ensure that all contestants have the same experience. Around 3 months prior, the host also worked on OSN 2024 (Indonesian National Olympiad for High Schooler), so they already tackled some technical issues.
As all parties are quite prepared for this year edition, we tried to do minor improvements, mostly to improve everyone's QoL:
- Enabling auto-login on contestant machines: this improvement can save up contestants time, so they do not have to deal with mistyped password.
- Showing medals for distinct universities: DOMJudge minor modification is needed to cater the judge's request.
- Installing vim (neovim 0.8.5) on contestant workstation: this is requested since long time ago, and finally we have time to address this to the host (kudos to vioalbert for helping me).
- Improving resolver preparation workflow: I tried to install CDS from ICPC Tools, and running resolver is easier this way.
As mentioned earlier, ICPC Asia Jakarta site never has a dedicated technical team. Based on 5+2+2 = 9 years observation as contestant, guest, and technical committee, I hope that this breakthrough could improve contest environment as well preventing failures, by pursuing ICPC World Finals standard in this site.