No ICPC at Our College? Fine, We'll Build It Ourselves: The Story of ICPC HUE
*"No ICPC in our college? Fine, we'll build it ourselves."*
Eight months ago, that single sentence marked the beginning of a journey where we built an entire university engineering community from the ground up—and sparked a software tool that reached 120,000 impressions in just 24 hours.
The Spark: An Empty Canvas
The story began at the Faculty of Artificial Intelligence at Horus University, which was newly established in 2024. We were the inaugural first batch. There were zero student clubs, zero technical societies, and nobody knew where to turn. At the start of sophomore year, my colleague Khaled introduced me to competitive programming and the ICPC—explaining how algorithmic mastery is the direct gateway to software roles at top tier companies like Noon and FAANG, where technical interviews revolve around data structures and problem solving.
I asked myself a simple question: *Why don't we have this at Horus?*
Right then and there, ICPC HUE was born.
Assembling the Founding Crew
We pitched the vision to our faculty leaders—Dean Prof. Dr. Hossam El-Din Moustafa, Dr. Basma Mostafa, Dr. Yasser Elawady, Eng. Fatma Magdy, Eng. Raafat M. Elmenayar, and Eng. Sara Lotfy. Their immediate enthusiasm and institutional backing gave us the green light. Despite the early hurdles of finding instructors and curriculum resources, within a month we had assembled our core leadership team:
• Ahmed Waleed: Primary Instructor & Curriculum Architect. • Abdelrahman Mohsen: Fundraiser & Operations Manager. • Yousef Mohammed Salah (Me): Web Lead, Platform Developer, Media & Event Logistics. • Omar Hisham Mohamed Elshayal & Ebrahim Matar: Co-Instructors. • Khaled Suleiman, Noha Kamal, Abdullah Shata, Mahmoud Elkholany: Monitors and Academic Support.
Five Months in the Trenches: Training 300+ Students
Over 5 intense months, our single mission was spreading technical awareness and coaching students from zero. Our lead instructor, Eng. Ahmed Waleed, personally volunteered over 30 hours of foundational lectures from scratch, complemented by daily problem-solving coaching in community chats.
To make problem solving intuitive and modern, I built and launched icpchue.com. The platform hosted 650 curated problems ordered progressively from beginner to advanced (based on the renowned Assiut University training sheets), a complete archive of recorded lectures, live contest leaderboards, gamified achievements, and seasonal prizes.
We organized orientation days, online practice contests, offline collegiate scrimmages, and hosted the DCC contest on our campus in partnership with ACPC Club Damietta University.
Special thanks to the leaders of ACPC DU who supported us along the way: *Asem Gado, Belal Elbably, Omar Badr, Anas Al-Horigy, Hossam Hassan, and Abdo Sleem.*
The Payoff: 8 Teams Qualified for ECPC
When registration closed, we had registered 8 official teams from our Faculty of AI for the Egyptian Collegiate Programming Contest (ECPC) qualifications—6 of which were Level 1 freshmen in their first year of programming!
How ICPC Transformed My Engineering Career
On a personal level, immersing myself in competitive programming dramatically leveled up my system design and algorithmic execution. That directly fueled our hackathon performances: 2nd Place out of 600 participants at the GDG Delta Hackathon, and 3rd Place at the LUXSAI Hackathon in Luxor.
Furthermore, when I noticed students hesitating to practice on Codeforces due to its dated 2000s interface, I engineered Verdict.run—a tool that allows you to change `codeforces.com` to `codeforces.verdict.run` in your URL bar and instantly renders the problem in a clean LeetCode IDE with headless server-side submissions via Playwright. When I posted the demo on LinkedIn, it exploded to 120,000 views within 24 hours.
While my personal team didn't qualify for ECPC this season, what we built along the way—3 hackathon wins, production platforms, and lifelong brothers in engineering—was the real victory.