Creating a World Athletics Score Calculator

2025-06-06T00:00:00Z

Making the Olympics or World Championships in track and field is hard. But it used to be relatively straightforward (at least in the US). All you had to do was run the world standard and get selected by the country you compete for. However, in 2019 World Athletics shook this up by introducing the world ranking system. The goal was to create a better method for identifying the best athletes globally. The system assigns a score to every event an athlete competes in and then uses the average of their top scores to compute their world ranking. This score is partially based on the mark the athlete achieved but also includes a placement component. While the score from the athlete's mark is standard across all competitions, competing in bigger, more prestigious meets results in more placement points. These placement points are designed to incentivize the best athletes in the world to compete in the best meets globally. Overall, I think this system is excellent. It's important for the sport to have the best athletes compete against each other as much as possible. My biggest issue with the system as both an athlete and a fan is that it's difficult to determine how scores are calculated. Last year, I had an outside chance at making the US Olympic Team in the 3k Steeplechase. However, I had not run the world standard and felt like my best opportunity would come from improving my world ranking. The question then became which races gave me the best chance at scoring the most points. After spending several hours digging through the world ranking rules, creating spreadsheets, and researching every meet that had a 3k steeplechase within a 3-continent radius, I developed a plan. By the US Olympic trials I was able to get a high enough world ranking to qualify for the Olympics. None of this ended up mattering because I completely bombed at the trials, but it was worth a shot. This experience convinced me that calculating world ranking scores should be much easier. I looked around for online calculators but none existed. There are a couple that will tell you the performance component of your score but none that account for the placement piece as well. Because of this, I created my own. It's running here and I hope that other people find it useful. The code for this project is on my github. If anyone finds errors or has suggestions for features that would improve it, let me know!

My SAA Certification Journey.

2024-11-15T00:00:00Z

In September of this year, I decided to tackle the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate (SAA) exam. Spoiler alert: I passed! 🎉 While studying, I often thought, _"If I could start this process over, what would I do differently?". This post is my attempt to answer that question. I'll share how I studied, what worked, and what I'd change if I had a redo.

Studying

My studying journey was a bit of a rollercoaster 🎢—some weeks I was highly motivated, while others I could barely bring myself to glance at my notes. Here's a rough breakdown of my timeline:

Weeks 1–4: Worked through Adrian Cantrill's SAA-C03 course.
Weeks 4–6: Reviewed notes and took random practice tests I found online.
Weeks 7–8: Dug into TutorialDojo practice tests and started using Anki.
End of Week 8: Passed the test! 🏆

Course Review

Adrian Cantrill’s course provided an excellent overview of AWS services and how they interact. However, I have a confession: I quit doing the demo lessons after about 25% of the course. The whole "click-this-button-then-that-button" routine didn’t feel like it was sticking. If the demos had been more self-guided, I think they might have reinforced the concepts better.

I took detailed notes on all the services as I went through the course, which you can find here. To take these notes I use Obsidian, which is one of my all time favorite apps. Honestly, my only issue with Obsidian is the people who evangelize it online. It isn't great at everything but it crushes taking notes for a class.

Where I Went Off Track

The time between finishing the Cantrill course and starting TutorialDojo practice tests was where I wasted the most time. This period was mostly me spinning my wheels trying to gather test-related info. I quickly realized I hadn’t retained as much as I’d hoped—especially around networking—and my recall was foggy at best.

Thankfully, this detour led me to discover Anki, the best flashcard system I’ve used. Like Obsidian, its fans hype it up a bit too much, but for this exam, it was a game-changer. AWS exams often test your ability to differentiate between services, and Anki helped me commit those details to memory.

I started by downloading a shared deck and worked through it. I also eventually caved and paid $10 for access to TutorialDojo practice tests—money well spent.

Practice Makes... Passing

At first, I failed every practice test. 😭 Demoralizing? Absolutely. But by the sixth test, my scores had climbed into the 70s. The biggest factor in my improvement was reviewing missed questions and turning them into flashcards. Anki's guide on good flashcard design helped me create cards that didn't suck.

I learned that quickly scanning missed questions wasn’t enough; without flashcards, I’d miss the same questions again. Flashcards kept me honest. Reflecting on this, I wish I’d been this rigorous in college. I spent a lot of time thinking I knew things when, in reality, I was just good at peeking at the answer key.

By the end of Week 8, after a week of daily practice tests and reviews, I scheduled my exam.

The Exam

The exam itself went as well as I could have hoped. I scored 847/1000, which was higher than my practice test averages. 🎉

Topics I Thought Were Overrepresented

VPCs and how to connect them.
RDS (especially Proxies).
Load Balancers (ALB vs. NLB).
Billing.
Organizational Units.
Web Application Firewalls.

Topics I Was Surprised to See Missing

CloudHSM.
FSx.
Machine Learning.
SQS vs. SNS.

Reflection

Looking back, I realize I wasted a lot of time transcribing detailed notes on every service. While taking notes helped me stay engaged, TutorialDojo’s service summaries were far more comprehensive than mine. If I could do it again, I’d take brief notes and focus more on flashcards for reviewing service details.

The notes I did find useful were those comparing related services, like...

RDS vs. Aurora.
SQS vs. SNS.
VPC Peering vs. Transit Gateway.
NACLs vs. Security Groups.

Anything that helps build context for when to use different services is invaluable.

I’m not sure if I’ll pursue more AWS certifications, but if I do, I feel confident I’ll study more efficiently next time. For now, I’m just happy I passed.

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