HASH CODE LIVE!
On March 1st, 2018 at 6:30pm the competition went live!
The problem statement was about assigning rides to a number of self driving vehicles. Cool right?
It was 6 pages long!!
5mins into the the competition, a number of teams already had 10 points. It took us -the awesome team RAILS- almost an hour to get enough understanding to write the first line of code and by this time, I had finished my sweets, was reaching out for my drink and 1st on the leader board had 17 million points! Now that was intimidating or better put motivating.
Guys Submit! Remember code and submit intermittently, what’s the point of having a good solution that never gets submitted?!
-AKINJOBI Sodiq @geektutor
All over the room we could hear @geektutor retiterating the statement above, ’twas like someone put him on an infinite loop!
So from a blank page to about 100 lines of code, we implemented an algorithm which scored 3.8 million points! ’twas the most exciting part of the competition!
Relative to others, we weren’t doing too well at that point -the top of the leader board at this time was about 49 million.- but this was our algorithm and the score was ours so we celebrated! We were not the best on the globe but we had made remarkable progress.
@geektutor ‘s loop condition seemed to check as false as he halted a moment only to scream
“We are balling! GdgUnilag is balling!”
A team in our hub had just hit 9 million points! wow! Success is sweet, I could feel it!
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We set out to optimise but couldn’t before the finish time, we however did optimise later in the night and got a total of 11.9 million points though this didn’t reflect in the official score since the time was up.
It’s one of the few times we’ve had to work on a project with an actual dealine and the first time I’ve worked with a team in a global competition. I did learn a few things I must confess.
- Submit intermitently. This is one of the best advices you’ld ever get in a competion like this.
- Too much thinking is a time waster, once you’ve read through the problem statement once, start coding! Even if you only declare variables and select the data structures you’ll use. Read all the data in the input file into your variables, you’ll get your first idea before you’re done.
- Set up a github repo with your team mates as collaborators, so you can eaily share your updates. You just “push” and they “pull”. Trust me you don’t want to be looking for a flash drive at this point.
- Put comments in your code, so you don’t have to pause and explain to your teammates what you tried to do at linex or line y.
- Consume your snacks slowly, you’ll need it when you get stuck
I’ll say the best take away from the night though, was the experience!
Many thanks to our hosts @geektutor and @osazeyyh under gdgunilag, whoever took the pictures and a big shoutout to all the teams who joined in electrifying the atmoshpere.
Click https://photos.app.goo.gl/WBAeGgs8v4p24M472 for more pictures.
See you next year!
This was hashcode2018!
https://github.com/Egahi/hashCode
#hashcodesolved.
