When is the next Code Wars in 2024?
Organising one? Let us know.
Bangkok Code Wars on Saturday 3rd February 2024, with ~120 developers joining for an afternoon of fun coding challenges, beer and pizza mania pizza.
Rules of Code Wars
- Code Wars are meant for Fun!
- these are simple coding problems that any programmer can solve in under 10min but solved under distracting circumstances
- The idea of Code Wars is to create the opposite of the ideal environment for coding and make it a game
- winning doesn’t make you a code ninja or improve your hackerrank (and it’s nothing like codewars.com)
- Qualification round - everyone can try
- A simple coding question will be shown on the big screen
- The first 6 individuals to submit the answer become team leaders and get to pick their team of 4 (or we can assign you a team)
- 2 “wildcard” teams will come from smug teams (correct answers from the audience) during the tournament
- Watch as 2 teams fight on stage in an 8 team instant knockout tournament
- Enjoy the show. Free beer and pizza.
- 1st team to code the right answer and annonuce it, continues to the next round
- one laptop/device per team - projected in a large font
- If no winner within 15 min a clue will be given
- Last team standing wins (around 3 hours)
- Bring your laptop (if you have one)
- You may think this is not for you
- Then you will see the problems and want to solve them
- Then you will regret not bringing your laptop!
- don’t have one? help a friend who has one or just watch
- You can use any language you want
- even Excel!
- Code must be yours and it must run. you can’t use AI assistants like Github Copilot
- You don’t need to know english
Still confused? watch Live stream of Code Wars 2020 to get the idea.
What are the questions like?
They are fizzbuzz type fun questions that take 5-15min to answer. They are questions any developer can answer in any language but it’s more fun when you are racing against someone else to get the answer first.
Try for yourself.
History
2020-12-19 Bangkok Code Wars 2020
Thanks to effective covid measures 2020 was covid free enough for us to hold an in-person event (we were lucky. Days later it covid broke out). Held at AIS DC with a large attendance and even an after party. You can watch the full Live stream: FB to get an idea of the event.
For full details see our Event Post
2019-12-13 Bangkok Christmas Code Wars 2019
Held at Kaidee on Friday the 13th with 12 different dev meetups involved. GummyBear recruitment sponsored the prizes of 5 RasberryPi 4s and Microsoft Azure sponsored beers and food.
2018-12-14 Code War Bangkok 2018!
Microsoft sponsored giving all the winning team a Surface Go. Hosted at “The Company” coworking space bangkok with over 100 attending.
2018 PyCon Thailand
In 2018, Dylan Jay created a Code Wars as a warm up event to the first PyCon Thailand. Any language was allowed but python seemed to win anyway.
Memorable because last minute the quizzmaster had somehow lost the answers to the questions so instead the organisers were solving them barely ahead of the contestants. It also seems we relaxed the 3 person per team rule.
2016-12-29 - Holiday Edition Social Hack Night on NYEEE (Bangkok)
In 2014 Dylan Jay moved to Bangkok and started the first Python Meetup (ThaiPy), the BKK Hack Night and also introduced the Code Wars concept at the end of 2016 as a social event for the BKK Hack Night.
Memorable by getting kicked out of the venue at midnight and having to run the final at the regular meetup the following month. Teams were only 2 due to limited space and turnout.
2010-2019 Kiwi PyCon (NZ)
From 2010 Kiwi PyCon also included the code war as a warm up event and continued to do so every year. In 2014 they messed with the format so all teams did all questions and no one got to see anyone’s code or sat on the stage being distracted. They didn’t do this again.
Links to other kiwi pycon Code Wars 2011, 2013, 2019
2010-2013 PyConAU (Australia)
Dylan Jay and Andy Stewart fell in love with the Code Wars concept and when the first ever PyConAU happened in sydney 2010 they proposed it as a friday night warmup event before the conference start on the saturday. It was hosted at Atlassian.
It was after this event the rule of the answer having to be both “said” and “on screen”. The ambiguous result was resolved peacefully via a danceoff
Graeme Cross: 2011 Code Wars and more
2012-2013 PyConAU (Hobart)
There is a good write up of the events in Aug 2012. Rules were the same except they dropped the one device per team rule. Not sure why.
In 2013 the PyCon Hobart organizers felt the need change the rules to make it a long cryptic adventure that everyone played from the audience which ended up removing all drama, pace and fun out of the event. PyConAu dropped Code Wars after this.
2008-2011 WebDU (Sydney, Australia)
Code Wars was created by Rocketboots CTO Robin Hilliard as a warm up social event for friday night before the WebDU conference in Sydney from 2008. Originally based on an idea from the book PeopleWare where they did Code Wars experiments on coders and found that spaces that are quiter, more private and better protected from interuption let codes complete simple tasks for quickly and with less errors. So Code Wars, the event, was born to make good intentioned coders compete in the least quiet, least private and most interuptable environment possible.
Original rules were the roughly the same except
- There was no qualification round. You just signed up
- Semi finals were 40min “creative” rounds judged on audience applause… it was a flash/coldfusion conference after all (Any language was still allowed of course…)