Look, I made a thing!

by | Jun 11, 2012

Racing cars is a lot of fun. What’s less fun is doing arithmetic by hand for an hour to find out how well people did. Fortunately, we now have the technology to ease this pain.

This guy I go out with, Quinn, is into drift racing. When he doesn’t have a car handy, he judges events. I’ve spent a fair bit of time chatting with him and other judges about how tedious the process is due to all the arithmetic required to add up scores during qualification rounds.

I wrote a program to make it easier. This is a Java applet which you can download at Github. You start an event, add drivers, score them, then click the big button to get a list of who made it through to competition, and who’s out. Simple, clean.

A screencap from the Capital Drift program.

Possibly too simple – currently, if you make a mistake in entering scores, there is no easy way to correct yourself. You have to delete the driver in question and start again. I’ve been thinking carefully about the best way to correct this issue, but I haven’t decided yet.

Nevertheless, the thing does what it is supposed to do and is available for beta testing. It will be tested this Saturday the 15th at Western Speedway, during Capital City Drift. If they like it well enough perhaps they’ll keep using it.

If you are in charge of any similar event, please feel free to download, recode for your own purposes, and let me know how it went.