21d • 💬 General discussion
Build the old competitions, with the answer key
I spent yesterday building out four old Weekly Comps. #4 through #7. I didn't submit any of
them, and every one of them closed months ago.
It was probably the most useful day I've had in here.
What I didn't appreciate until I tried it: the winners and honorable mentions are still
sitting in the stacks. That's an answer key. When you enter a comp live, you build blind and
find out afterward how you did. When you build an old one, you read the brief, build your
version, and then go compare it against work that already cleared the bar. And you can
borrow, out loud, with credit.
That changed what I built. On #5 the winner used a schedule-lock, so I adapted it into a
number gate: no scripts, no frameworks, nothing until the user says one number, unhedged. On
#7 I took the ordered short-circuit gate flow from the winner's two entries. On #6 I took
"announce your interpretation before you act" from Mayston.
Each one still needed something of its own, and having the winner in front of me made that
easier to find rather than harder. I could see what was already covered and go somewhere else.
The one I'd point at is #4, The Agency. The brief asks for a real-estate agency OS, and the
winner built exactly that, publicly. I almost rebuilt it. Then it occurred to me that a
five-folder Austin real-estate system on my GitHub, sitting right next to an existing public
winner, reads as derivative. And I don't know real estate, so every handoff between
specialists would have been invented.
So I built the same architecture on my own back office instead. Same five folders, different
vertical. The handoffs were real because I actually run them. Then I added a validator that
exits non-zero on a malformed handoff card, and it caught two genuine defects in my own
examples while I was writing them.
None of this gets submitted anywhere. It's four repos I didn't have on Friday.
If you joined late, or you looked at a comp and thought you didn't have time that week: the
brief is still there. So are the winners. Go build the old one.
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Build the old competitions, with the answer key
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