We asked members of our team…
What programming challenges should be considered an Olympic sport?
Imagine if programming had its own Olympic Games—what events would make the cut? We had a blast asking our team this fun question, and their answers were anything but ordinary. From the heart-pounding excitement of Debugging Marathons to the nail-biting drama of Cache Invalidation, the suggestions ranged from the incredibly intense to the downright quirky.
Let’s see what our team members had in mind with these imaginative “sports”:
Herbert Wolverson
Rust Instructor / Consultant
Debugging Marathon, the Ticket Closing Sprint (Rust would win the 100m Race Condition) or the Stand-Up Challenge in which managers extend stand-up meetings and the last programmer standing wins.
Paulo Simao
Ardan Labs Engineer
Algorithmic Speed Coding, the objective would be to solve algorithm based problems that keep progressively getting harder, as fast as possible. The challenge: it needs a deep understanding of algorithms and data structures, but also a good capacity for working under pressure - like thinking and typing.
Miki Tebeka
Go & Python Instructor
Cache Invalidation or Naming Things
Florin Patan
Ardan Labs Engineer
Refactoring Legacy Code or Investigating DNS problems (not a programming issue per se, but one of the first ones that came to mind).
Jérôme Petazzoni
Docker & Kubernetes Instructor
Coxless Pair Programming (more story points wins). Each pair needs to get their pull requests merged by the end of the sprint, and each failing test affects their score.
OR
Bare Metal Triathlon (smallest configuration wins). Each team needs to use a combination of Terraform, Ansible, and Powershell to deploy a Mastodon instance on a 20-year old Dell server running Windows NT. The mere mention of the race is usually awe-inspiring.
So, there you have it—a playful peek into what the world of programming might look like if it were given its own Olympic spotlight. As we dream of a programming Olympics, it’s clear that the skills and creativity involved in tech can rival even the most exciting athletic feats. Who knows, maybe one day we’ll see a gold medal for the fastest bug fix or the most efficient code refactor! Until then, let’s enjoy these whimsical visions of our coding heroes in action.