The aim was to solve 11 algorithmic problems within two hours, using Isograd’s TOSA system. Due to the limitation of this web-based editor, we had Eclipse installed (at least for Java developers), and we copy pasted the code back and forth between the two editors. The accepted languages were Java, C# and PHP, but my guess is that we Java developers were the lucky ones, because we had a decent editor (I’m not sure how you can develop in C# under Mac, and I saw several PHP devs struggling with the Eclipse debugger).
The first hurdles appeared before the competition. Being rather a PC user, the Mac keyboard was not easy to get used to, mainly all those different shortcuts, sometimes using the Control key, sometimes the Command key, sometimes the Option key . Some people brought their own keyboards, but it proved even more difficult because they did not manage to have all the keys at their correct place. The mouse’s lack of right click button made also my life difficult, although someone told me how to configure it afterwards.
Came the first exercise, the most difficult one according to me, since its subject was also a bit misleading. You had to write a Sort Iterator, which receives a list of iterators, and was supposed to give their values sorted. The idea was not to get all values first, and then sort them, since some iterators were giving values indefinitely! In fact, the aim was to get the next value from each iterator, and give back the smallest value which was still higher than or equal to the previous one. So tricky that I saw several contestants stuck on this first one till the end of the contest.
First problem during this first exercise, it seems that the server was restarted meanwhile, and several of us had to re-login. Another problem at the end of the second exercise: a dialog box pops-up, telling us that we already solved the problem, and another one will be proposed. But nothing happens when you press the OK button. We had to wait for several minutes till the problem was solved, and then we were back to execise number one. I was lucky that I kept the code for each exercise in separate files, so I could simply copy/paste my answers again. But I saw some others pressing frantically Ctrl-Z (or Command-Z or whatever) to get back to the previous code.
This dialog box problem happened to me again after the third exercise, and again after the fourth. Lots of minutes were lost like this. After exercise 1, the others were not too difficult, except maybe for one involving weights and scales which required some thinking. At the end of the two hours I made it to exercise number 7, where a pop-up informed me that I was more than 2000 seconds behind the number one. I wonder if he was hindered by all these problems as most of us were.
All together, it was a nice experience, with good hardware, whatever peculiar, good software too, although marred with several system problems, and there was a good mood among the developers themselves. Now I’m waiting for the ranking that should be sent to us by e-mail anytime soon.
Update: David Gageot, the originator of Coding Story, wrote about it on his blog. It seems like the failures were worst than I thought.
Update 2: Isograd published an explanation of their bug here. Meanwhile, they also sent me my ranking by mail. I am number 7. Not bad :)