Parallax's Brad Cornes Wins Code In The Dark 2019

If you were unaware of what was taking place in Duke Studios on the night of 25th April 2019, you’d think you’d have stumbled into the infamous blood rave scene from 1998 supernatural classic Blade, or some sort of Matrix themed party. Thumping techno gave the room a feel of electricity, lasers and smoke machines cast eerie shadows across the crowd, all of whom were transfixed on… screens of CSS & HTML? What you'd actually stumbled upon was Code in the Dark, part of the ninth annual instalment of Leeds Digital Festival, in which 25 elite frontend developers compete against each other and the clock, in front of an audience of friends, family, colleagues, industry bods and fellow coders.Contestants are given a webpage which they must reproduce in just 15 minutes, without looking at a browser preview. This years heats included Netflix and DC websites, among others. Efforts were judged by a panel of experts from across the region, in what can only be described as a high stakes game of spot the difference! After 5 closely contested heats, 5 coders marched valiantly to the final, which entailed an incredibly difficult maths problem hidden in javascript.,"To solve this problem you have to review a sequence of digits and find the sum of all digits that match the next digit in the list. The list is circular, so the digit after the last digit is the first digit in the list”Only one coder could walk away champion, and after five incredibly close rounds and a gruelling final, our very own front-end developer Brad Cornes emerged victorious. He commented: "I have competed every year since Code in the Dark came to Leeds in 2016, and after failing spectacularly in the final last year it felt great to finally take home the trophy.”When asked whether he’ll be returning to defend his crown he said "I’m sure I’ll talk myself into competing again next year, against my better judgement!"