OITM 2023

The 7th OITM has just finished for me. OITM is an IT championship in Hungary, sponsored by large tech companies held in November for 7 rounds.

The current championship had 23 challenging categories across different fields. Every week there’s a new round. This year I participated in 15 categories.

How I felt

I haven’t learned from past years, and applied for way more categories than I should have. It resulted in almost burning myself out, doing the tasks without much consideration and just drilled some categories to get to the end. I should have unsubscribed from the categories that were too complex and I did not have a clue about them, I might have felt better about this contest then.

The contributor companies offered nice awards for the top players, nevertheless I still could not put in all my energy into this contest. During the solutions I was constantly thinking about how many people would find their way to trick their points like using LLMs or friends or double accounts. The low point was when even the organizers pointed it out, that by analyzing the data patterns arise.

Although I really like to be challenged in the categories I actually know about, the questions make me think in new ways and I can see where can I improve.

My favorite category was still the Cloud BI, there are a bunch of things for me to learn and I love that area.

Recently I started to get into iot and smart homes and I love, that I got to learn about industrial networks and MQTT and I could battle test my newfound knowledge.

I did not like that some categories used external sites that maybe worked maybe not, there were features that they expected to be there that were gone by the time the categories went live.

Things not always go as they planned, this year 4 of the tests (out of the categories I participated in) were disqualified after the round, it was the most since I’ve been in this contest.

I love how the language independent programming context has 2 different tasks with increasingly large inputs, gives a chance to differentiate the contestants, but 3 hours was too much for me now to dedicate only for one round.

Cyber security had a CTF again that made me dive into CTFs, it was such a pleasure to see this kind of task again!

What Changed

This year the organizers gave the possibility for companies to compete with one another. I’d be interested in seeing a leaderboard from within the company, I might ask around if there won’t be a leaderboard.

I like that the categories keep up with the trends and there was a new category for large language models.

This year the organizers brought back the strict time limited rounds at the end, so we had almost as much time to log in and submit the solutions as the total time of the time given for the task at that round. People had mixed feelings about them, luckily I did not have planned activities so it did not block me this time.

Results

I earned these badges, that are currently visible on my profile.

• 1x Category champion (Accessible websites)
• 67/105 rounds I scored over the average point of all participants
• 32/105 rounds I finished earlier than the average of all participants
• 11/105 flawless rounds
• 11/15 played all rounds of the category

Here are what I know about my results as of now for this year ordered by Percentage:

Nevertheless I am looking forward to it next year!

Happy Coding!