Speed Demon 2026: Two developers share eight lessons from a 72-hour performance contest

Bharat Labs, a two-person team of Aryan Verma and Lakshya Varshney, entered all four tracks of Speed Demon 2026, a 72-hour performance-engineering hackathon by Hackathon Raptors. Contestants receive a correct but naive Python program and must speed it up without changing its output, with every submission run on one fixed machine. The team's account centers on eight times the live scoreboard contradicted their local measurements, most notably a memory reading of 37 MB on their laptops versus 195 MB on the scoring machine. The scoring formula weighs wall time, memory, code size and dependencies, and the team says their Track C entry rose from 43rd to a much higher rank after corrections. The team reports that 162 of their 266 commits were co-authored with an AI model, and that they set goals and checked every board result themselves.