arithma wroteI've been trying to put sometime aside for topcoder.com lately but failed to do so. They have a lot of types of competitions:
- algorithms: you either succeed or fail in three exercises. Score is altered per problem for the time you take solving the problem. It's highly competitive and scientific.
- marathon matches: comparative score with a strategy for scoring decided per match. Every match is a single open ended problem. The duration is long (usually more than a week) and scores can update more than once for early submissions against a subset of test cases.
It is a well known fact that working with a programmer with a high topcoder ranking is an experience like no other.
One of the top coders in the world is called Petr, from Russia.
His blog
There's also the
Programming Challenges book that we can exercise on here to perform better out there.
I think our community is more akin to collaboration on learning rather than competing on such a small scale.
- Skill levels
- and different focus of skills
Competitions measure a particular skill set.
Pizza programming parties are one of my fantasies though.
Part of the cometition is practice, so the rookie or junior level programmers here can gain experience from the veteran programmers during the practice sessions that would be held. These sessions can turn into "Pizza Programming Parties" (
My Treat). PS: Remember the
first attempt to open an IEEE student chapter @ HCU? One of the events was to hold a pizza programming party sponsored by Google (the one and only). Other parties included XBox Gaming (sponsored by Microsoft) and LAN Gaming parties. Will try to see if I can organize one of those again for the LebGeek community.
Besides, in the competition, each team of 4 programmers
must have a rookie programmer, a junior level programmer, and 1 or 2 veteran programmers (according to years of experience). The work presented would be collaborative, so each will gain experience from the other (either learning programming tricks or how to teach other programmers).
The competition is just an incentive. If programming parties is what you want to do, we can reserve a place and do it soon (1st party would be my treat, maybe also in Adha vacation?).
You just agree to show up, and leave the rest to me.