CodeCom 2011

Hello all, pardon me for my lack of posts - this frequency really indicates how much work I have in school the past week.

To make up for that, here's a really interesting update regarding a Tri-University competition organized by NUS Hackers last Saturday!

 

This competition is really cool as it is a Ruby programming tournament conducted on Singpath - a game platform designed & developed by my Professor, Chris Boesch, for anyone to learn programming languages like Ruby, Javascript, Java and Python. Try the game to learn a new language if you are free too! Being a student in Chris's cloud computing class, I have learnt the Python language in a few weeks by solving almost all the questions there. If I can do it, so can you. We can discuss about the solutions too! (:

Anyway, I signed up for the competition one day before with practically zero knowledge about Ruby. Knowing at the back of my head that I will be pitting myself up against other more experienced Ruby programmers, I commented on Facebook that I must be insane - well, my competitors are related to 'NUS Hackers' for a reason right? So.. I kept my expectations low, did some practice the night before, went for Japanese class in the morning, and turned up for the competition at NUS Extension after that.

Now then, how did the competition go? To my surprise, my boyfriend, Adrian, and I rocked the first round by completing all the questions in less than 3minutes!! Woot! I guess the weekly Python drilling in class helped, but it was nevertheless extremely exciting yet intimidating at the same time to code in an environment with near 40 people frantically typing on their laptops, all vying to enter the next round.

 

After near 20minutes, the top 20 competitors emerged and we proceeded to round 2. This time I was more afraid as the difficulty of the questions increased, and we had no access to any notes or APIs. Soon, the competition began. 

As Adrian had some background knowledge in Ruby, he solved the questions in top speed, 'blazing ahead of us', and completed real fast. As for me, I was stuck at question 11 as I did not know the for loop syntax for Ruby. The only for loops i knew was  for(int i=0; i<n; i++) or for i in range(0,len(n)), for i in x. How to write it in Ruby??! The clock ticked, I was back to back with 2 other competitors. I could not search Google for the syntax. Seriously, I almost fainted. -- After LOTs of trail and error + squeezing my brain cells to recall the ruby syntax, the solution for i in a..b worked! Then, seconds later, the API could be accessed by everyone! Oh my I really sped up like crazy and wooolala! I got second! Yes! Guys don't look down on girls. Girls can code too! (:

So with that, I am a happy girl with a new 19" LCD ViewSonic Monitor.

What an adventure. We had fun, made new friends, more details can be seen here. In summary, it is really worth it to do something insane once in a while.

Life is short, live it to the fullest! (: