Programming's Hard
Tuesday February 11, 2014
Day one of the PikPok Developer Conference has just gone by. My talk on Dynamic Programming was well received and the programming competition had a few glitches here and there, but on the whole, not too much trouble.
I think it was a pretty big gamble pushing to run a programming competition at work. There is a lot of preparation involved, a lot of uncertainty. Not only did I have to organise all the questions and answers (one answer was wrong ;_;), I had to fight hard to convince all the programmers to enter! Har har. I think most people had a good time, and if they didn't, I think at least they would have learned how programming competitions work, and been made aware of the pressures and challenges you face when having to work in those conditions - I guess it's just an extension (or in parallel?) to how we'd do it in a day-to-day situation.
Quite a few people were tripped up on how to read from standard in - who does that anyway? Luckily for the Python programmers, they had it easy in that respect. We had a lot of problems with presentation errors - too much whitespace, too many newlines, those kinds of pedantic tidbits that don't really matter in the big picture. They are there to test people's ability to follow instructions rather than test their programming ability, which I might look into changing for future installations. Perhaps I can provide some basic reading/writing code so that people only have to implement the body of a method instead of deal with input/output problems? Is there a way I could do that for all programming languages that we support? Could we integrate that into DOMjudge somehow? All questions that I'll need to think about!
Because I split the group up into random teams of two, it was also interesting to see how people tackled pair programming. The dynamic between colleagues is always fascinating to observe, especially if there is conflict or strong opinions! I say that with a bit of schadenfreude, but this may be of use to my boss.
I would like to see more of these in the future, and hopefully my boss will approve (and mandate?!) these competitions to be run on a regular basis. I'd say today was a success.
Posted by Jeremy at 7:12am on Tuesday February 11, 2014 :: 0 comments :: 