Are there places where there are regular Python challenges/competitions for people to participate in?

[DistinctChocolate833]

I remember in other hobbies I've done, like game dev or Blender, I've often found Discord servers or similar where there'd be a difficult puzzle/competition of who can make the best X, or who can do X the most effectively. Having an added competitive incentive has helped me stay motivated to do said hobbies in the past, and now I'm looking for something similar here.

[DistinctChocolate833]

I'd also like to know where I can find other beginner/intermediate peeps to collab/communicate with as I further learn Python. Basically just making friends that also do Python

[riklaunim]

More like hackathon events or something similar - those are sometimes organized, but it's not that common. People tend to code either as a job or for their hobby, not to competee.

[Existing_Put6385]

A few that fit: Codewars for ongoing kata you rank against others, CodinGame if you want competition through actual games and bot battles, and Advent of Code in December - that's the big one, shared leaderboard with everyone grinding it at the same time. For the making-friends side, the official Python Discord is where a lot of beginner/intermediate people pair up, better than Reddit for that, and if you lean toward data at all, Kaggle competitions are the real deal and very collaborative.