Why I Built an Open-Source Online Judge Instead of Maintaining a Legacy One

For years, IFSul – Campus Charqueadas, a federal institute in southern Brazil, has hosted programming marathons for both high school and undergraduate students. Like many educational institutions, our goal has always been straightforward: create opportunities for students to develop problem-solving skills, learn programming, and experience the challenge and excitement of competitive programming. What most participants never see, however, is everything happening behind the scenes. This is the story of how our contests evolved from manual grading to automated judging, why I decided to build a new platform instead of maintaining a legacy one, and how that project eventually became both an open-source judge system and an online competitive programming platform. The Era of Manual Grading When our programming marathons began, there was no automated judging system. Teams would solve problems, submit their source code, and wait for organizers to evaluate the solutions manuall