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by rurban 1367 days ago
There are some good swiss pairing systems on GitHub, I had to use recently. Written in C, but it works as nice as the system she wrote. Would have saved her some sweat. There's also one in typescript with very nice UI, but not completely Swiss, just some random swiss with extended constraints (girls prefering to play against girls, and such).
2 comments

Fair point, but sometimes, especially with a deadline and a rough idea of how you're going to implement something, it's faster to code something yourself, warts and all, rather than sifting through Github to find ones that look good, cloning, installing dependencies, and checking that they have all the features you need, they work correctly, and that you won't need to familiarise yourself with someone else's codebase quickly enough to fix edge cases.
Well, when I faced a similar problem (organizing large table tennis tournaments) which exceeded the limit of the usual free android apps (max 10 players), I prepared beforehand these two apps.

And in one cases I even needed it then, because too many players showed up. Using a lame closed-source app causes always sweat, so I'm better well prepared.

https://github.com/search?q=swiss+tournament&type=repositori... => 667 results

https://github.com/JeffHoogland/pypair/blob/master/pypair.py uses the exact same format she needed.

She was a judge, not the organiser, as far as I can tell, although it's great she was able to help, contingency planning is something more for the event organiser. The contingency planning seemed to have been MTGMelee, with untested further contingency options of Challonge and YuGiOh!, all of which failed.

You were able to find one that looks like the format she needed, but what would you have done if it doesn't? Or if it's broken?

It takes time to review > 300 lines of code, and she was on the clock. Even if she is able to read 1 line per second, it would take her five minutes just to read through the code, without downloading it, running it, testing it.

I absolutely agree that there should be a review of the contingency planning, but having more confidence in your coding abilities than your ability to search Github effectively is not necessarily wrong.

I answered this question on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Oritart/status/1575177486056718337