There's a moment after a race when you turn the engine off and everything goes quiet. That's where I am with competitions this year.
Races --- 5
Wins --- 2
Two Wins and a Dangerous Habit
I won 2 big dev challenges this year, and it got me so hyped that I couldn't stop entering more and more of them. Winning does that to you. You start refreshing the challenges page like crazy.
Then I found out I hadn't won my latest challenge. Did that slow me down? Not even a little. It made me want the next one even more.
The Idea That Never Showed Up
So I set my sights on the next one: the Presage SmartSpectra SDK Challenge.
I was fired up to get started, even though I had no idea what to build.
That's how it usually works. You never know which challenge is coming next, so you come up with an idea on the run. Metal Birds Watch literally started as a word association: Copilot, Pilot, Airplanes. Give me 2 or 3 days and something always clicks.
Back in May, during the Gemma 4 challenge, though, I had the opposite problem. I had so many ideas for the challenge that I couldn't pick one, and I ended up building an app for exactly that problem.
But This Time It's Different
It's been 4 or 5 days and I still have nothing. I've hit the ceiling.
I don't want to build something just for the sake of the challenge, because even if I won, it wouldn't feel special when I look back at my GitHub repositories. I want to build something I'm proud of, not something AI suggested. That's not how we roll here. If even I don't care about my creation, how do I expect that someone else will?
Effort Doesn't Guarantee a Win
There's another thing. After my recent losses, I realized that no matter how much energy and passion you put into a project, it doesn't guarantee a win.
For my last entry, I wrote every dataset by hand, and I finished the project with one eye patched up after a small surgery on my eyelid. It didn't matter.
You can drain yourself to the point where you can't think clearly the next day, and it still won't matter. Someone might come up with a better idea, build it better, or make a better video about it.
The judges only care about the end result, and rightfully so.
All In or Not at All
DEV challenges take a huge chunk of my free time, energy, and mental resources. If I commit to one, I have to go all in. There's no other option.
That was great in the first half of the year, when I was relatively fresh. Now it's a little different. It might be burnout, which I don't really pay attention to because I'm used to it. But I have so many other things going on right now that it's just harder to make time for challenges. I have a lot of personal projects to maintain and new articles and videos to create. I don't want to take any more time from them.
I've also noticed that people appreciate the things I create on my own even more, with no challenge attached, and I love that. I have so many cool ideas, and I need to ship them before someone else does.
Confessions of a Competition Junkie
I'm a competition junkie, though. I love the anticipation of the results and the huge spike of adrenaline and dopamine when I hear I just won. Oh god, I still remember winning those 2.
Let's recap the year real quick.
The Wins
Metal Birds Watch
Metal Birds Watch (GitHub Copilot CLI Challenge). A real-time aircraft tracker that watches the sky (using a public API) for you and notifies you when a plane flies over. It groups users into grid cells for caching, which was something that I came up with, and I'm still extremely proud of.
Check out the video:
NoteRunway
NoteRunway (Notion MCP Challenge). A cleanup crew for your Notion workspace. Seven tools hunt down duplicates, dead links, stale pages, and the API keys you swore you'd move later, and nothing destructive runs without your approval.
Check out the video:
The Losses
Sunday DEV Drive
Sunday DEV Drive (Weekend Challenge) a synthwave driving game where your DEV articles become neon billboards along an endless road. Enter a username and cruise past your own titles and quotes. I built it in a weekend with Three.js and no build tools, and the car is made from 46 boxes.
Check out the video:
NeuralHats
NeuralHats (Gemma 4 Challenge). Six AI personas, all running locally on Gemma 4, debate any topic using Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats. The Blue Hat decides when the debate is over, and a seventh model writes the final report.
Check out the video:
Georgian Language Benchmark
Georgian Language Benchmark (Kaggle Benchmarking Challenge). Eight OpenAI and Anthropic models against five Georgian language tasks I wrote by hand. They understand Georgian almost perfectly. Producing it correctly is a whole different story.
Sorry, I don't have a video for this one (yet).
So 2 wins out of 5. That isn't too bad. I also entered a couple of writing challenges, but I'm not counting those, because you don't really build something new for those.
I REALLY wanted to make it 3 wins this year, but as they say, you can't win them all. Sometimes you need to lose to adjust your approach and style.
Not Done Yet, Haven't Even Started
Am I done with challenges for good? Oh, no! I'm not going anywhere. I'm just getting started.
The moment I hear about a hackathon where I can build something really good, I'm in, guaranteed. And I'm going for that win with all I've got, down to the last ounce of energy. There's no other way for me to do things.
But for 2026, the engines are off, but only for hackathons.
Other than that, I'm going to be even more productive. I still have a few projects and articles to create.
And for those of you who follow me closely, you're in for a treat. I'm cooking up a few good things. Stay tuned.
Let's stay connected!
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