Ahoy mateys!
TL;DR: Come solve 2 problems a day in September 2025 Long Challenge from September 1 through September 7.
A couple weeks back, I posted about vibe coding a programming challenges platform. I was rather happy with the output, so I fine-tuned it further and added some more features:
- Contest message log. No pubsub notifications, just a simple table below the problem list that displays notifications directly from the database. It has automated notifications for e.g. a problem being solved for the first time, and allows me to insert arbitrary messages for e.g. problem statement changes.
- Profile page. You can now pick how you want to be displayed — your GitHub username (if you OAuthed with GitHub), your Google name (if you OAuthed with Google), or Player #1234.
- Groups. I needed some way for users to organize into custom leaderboards, and really tried to avoid copying the corresponding Advent of Code feature — but in the end, it turned out that with my leaderboard architecture it was the only viable option.
In the backend, I fixed a critical database interaction bug (I used an old-school connection pooler instead of pgBouncer, which resulted in a stress-test of any magnitude making the database unavailable for 1 minute), and added metrics through PostHog, which honestly is an amazing tool even on the free tier.
