Secret Horse Race: The Piscine Game

At 42 there's something curious: people who want to get in —the future students— go through the piscine, an intense month on campus, and during that time they're right there but at the same time unreachable. You can't have contact with anyone who's going through it. And to us, the ones already inside, itched with curiosity to know how those strangers would do.

From that curiosity the Secret Horse Race was born: a private game, made by and for fellow students, where each race is a specific piscine. You pick a pisciner —the candidate that's in that month—, your "horse", and follow their progress: the app accumulates metrics and points during the piscine, applies penalties, and at the end generates a ranking, podium and history.

How it works

At first we were six people symbolically betting on strangers. Little by little more students have joined, and what was a small game has become an internal tradition with a life of its own: every new piscine, a new race; every pisciner, a horse with a name, a face, and followers.

The rules are simple, but it's more serious than it seems: only the pisciners actually chosen are scored; the ranking shows the photo, the login, and the score of each horse, and who picked them. At the end, the Hall of Fame preserves the history of all the races.

The game that became a real app

What I like most about the project is how it grew technically out of real necessity: FastAPI with PostgreSQL, migrations with Alembic (ordered changes to the database structure), OAuth authentication from 42 (you log in with your student account, no new password), closed access with an invitation code and post-piscine student validation (fail-closed mode: if there's doubt, it's blocked), pisciner synchronization from the 42 API with background imports, automatic daily emails with the race summary, and the whole thing in Docker (the system that packages the app so it runs the same on any machine).

Even the login has its charm: the initial screen is just a dark background with a shield and a π symbol; the login form appears with SHIFT + click on the π.

What I've learned

Building for real people changes everything, compared to the academic exercises I've been describing on the blog —from libft, building the toolbox to level 5 completed—: the requirements come from users, not from an assignment. When a classmate tells you "could you add news?" or "the emails land better at another hour", that's a different kind of engine. The Secret Horse Race was born as a game to get to know those who were coming, and it's ended up becoming my project with the most real users. And every time a new piscine starts, there are people watching the ranking.