After 9 years 1 month in development, hopefully it was worth the wait. Below is a rundown of what the 2020-2021 school year will look for the MCPT: what has changed, what will stay the same, and everything in between. Thank you for your patience.

Quickfire Branch Updates

Competitive: Back again with more contests and a new initiative to help you debug your code!

Judge: Fancy new tech to make everything better 🌐.

Contests: ICS3U and more.

Learning: The newly formed learning branch is here to help you through the ICS curriculum while also expanding your world of coding knowledge in an interactive, informative, and (most importantly) fun way!

Contests

As MCPT will be mainly online (as far as we know), contests will be an essential part of keeping this club active and running! We'll be hosting a variety of fun contests, including...

• Weekly or biweekly competitive contests, made by Competitive CPT!

• Junior and Senior level LCCs, which will be held monthly and (probably) hosted fully online

• A Girls Invitational; as of right now, this is set to be held online. There is even a possibility of two Girls Invitationals to make up for last year

• ICS3U contests ... and more?

MCPT also hosted ECOO last year, and we hope to do the same this year. The top performing Senior LCC teams from throughout the year will be chosen to compete, so make sure to participate in all of our LCCs!

Technical

The entire MCPT online platform should be much more stable and scalable with our new setup. We have bought a few more servers and have separated key parts of the site including the multiple site and judge servers, a general service and database server, alongside an authentication and logging server. We can now automatically create more site and judge servers based on demand, which hopefully means no more less of those dreaded 500s right as LCC starts. We'll also be able to host larger contests like Girls Invitational without much extra work.

New tools like Ansible, ZeroTier, and LDAP have all been used in conjunction with Nginx, MariaDB, Django and many others to accomplish these improvements.

If you're interested in this technology, feel free to checkout our GitHub, talk to any of us on the judge team, and maybe even apply for exec :D.

Thank you for staying with MCPT during these difficult times. We appreciate each and every one of our members, and we hope you join us in the 2020-2021 school year.