The Alcoding Club

The Alcoding Club is the Competitive Programming Club of PES University. I joined in January 2024 as a member of the technical team, where my work was mostly problem-setting and writing test cases for the monthly coding contests we hosted. That taught me a lot about the optimisation and contest-thinking side of competitive programming, well beyond just DSA — it was my first real exposure to that experience.

During my time on the Problem Setting Team, I also helped organise the club’s flagship 24-hour hackathon, Terrathon 3.0, the university’s largest sustainability-themed hackathon, run in collaboration with the Changemakers’ Society.

When I became Head of the club in September 2024, I was one of very few second years to have become a club head that quickly, so I had a lot of figuring out to do. Luckily my core team had some very talented people.

The first event I hosted was the October coding contest. It was very early in my time as club head, and since a lot of the club had graduated or left and fresh recruitments were not done yet, I remember pulling all-nighters almost every night before the contests — setting up the contest, creating questions, making test cases. Huge thanks to Hashir Shaikh and Munis Shafiq for pitching in and helping me set questions. We were understaffed, but we pulled it off.

Usually around November every year, the Google Developer Student Club (GDSC) at PES University hosts a Docker workshop. During my year, 2024, that club was inactive because of some minor handover issues, so Hackerspace ECC hosted the workshop at EC Campus and my club pitched in to host it on the main campus (Docker workshop post). It was an interesting experience in event organisation and my first exposure to the operations side of event management: booking the venue, organising food, getting event permissions, managing the budget, and getting the speaker, Pranavjeet Naidu, a member of the open source community at PES.

The final event I hosted as club head was Terrathon 4.0, the club’s flagship 24-hour hackathon. It was its own kind of fun: as club head there was a surprising amount of technical work in running a hackathon, mostly data science to manage spreadsheets of budgets, registrations, and volunteers. It was one of the few times I got to put my Python data-management skills to work.

All in all, during my time as club head, We conducted 6 coding contests, 2 workshops and 1 hackathon (in collaboration with the Changemakers’ Society).