RowdyHacks XII: Find me !!
The one challenge on the board with no technical component: find and speak to the challenge author during the hackathon. Credited after the freeze.
Challenge
Misc, in person. The task was what the name says: find the person who wrote the challenges and speak to them during the hackathon. There was no service to enumerate, no artifact to analyse, and nothing hidden in a file. Three of the 62 teams were credited with it.
Approach
None of the usual tooling applies, and dressing this up as a technical solve would misrepresent it. The whole challenge was presence: being on the floor, talking to organisers and other competitors, and noticing who was running the competition rather than only playing in it.
We had already met the challenge author earlier in the event, before this challenge was being actively run. We raised that with the organisers, who confirmed the encounter and credited the solve retroactively.
Scoring note
This one is worth 100 points, and it sits outside the recorded total because of when it landed. The public scoreboard froze with Team Difference on 5,825, exactly the sum of the 27 challenges solved by that point. Credit for this one came after the freeze, so the 100 is not inside that figure. Two further challenges were released in a late wave around the same point.
The organizers' own post-event statistics are the reference for the totals quoted on the event page: 28 challenges, 474 correct submissions across the field. The 5,825 figure is the score the frozen board recorded, and it stands as the final result.
Takeaway
Worth recording precisely because it is not a technical result. In-person competitions carry social and meta challenges beside the technical ones, and they reward turning up and engaging rather than any particular skill. The defensible claim from this challenge is initiative and presence; the capability evidence lives in the other 27 writeups.