It all began in the month of July when our TPO had called all the students for a presentation for which we had the representatives from TCS, Chennai. They had come to give us a basic idea about an event that was going to change our lives forever. Yes you guessed it right !! It is the TCS Codevita 2012 Coding Competition organised by TCS to bring out the coding whiz inside you. Looking from that day onwards, TCS Code Vita has been an incredible journey for the three of us – Sriram Baskaran, Shankar Narayanan and myself -Hari Raghav from Meenakshi Sundarajan Engineering College , Chennai.
So what is this contest about?
Code Vita is one of the well organized and excellently coordinated coding contests conducted by TCS involving people from over India. It involved three rounds where the number of teams kept on gradually reducing from 12,000 and odd down to just 10. The problem statements were having a difficulty level of easy, medium or hard. The questions were as simple as Transpose of a matrix or as complex as providing a solution to a NP Complete problem. The technical team involved in this event had worked exceptionally in order to provide intriguing questions to the participants.
On the D’day :
The 6 hour coding marathon came to the end with a nail biting finish. We were nervous and were constantly refreshing the screen of Mooshak server hoping to be in the top 4 of the rankings, as time was running out, and before the results. When we came back to the Audi, there was a delay in announcing the results, our hearts were pumping hard, hands were cold. Finally the results were out and when our names were called out, it was the best feeling , excitement mixed with joy! We were placed Second lagging by just one problem which the first place had submitted in the last second. But nonetheless It was a sense of accomplishment for us.
The aftereffects:
This particular event had radically transformed our lives and for that we would first like to thank TCS for having initiated such a nationwide competition to encourage young people like us to take up coding as a sport. When we went back to college, TCS came for campus recruitment. Our team were specially called and given our offer letters and it was really great to receive one without sitting in the room for an interview! Also the other bonuses that we got were a new Samsung Galaxy tab , IEEE membership and an internship.
Final words:
Experience is considered the best teacher. The important thing in life is not victory but the battle. We never expected to win when we registered. We just wanted to take part in the event and learn something out of it.
Some tips :
1. Beware of boundary conditions. Most of the test cases will check if your code is robust by giving values that are outside the input range. The codes are tested mainly for this.
2. Better to use simple command prompt for running Java when the programs are related to Command Line Arguments.
3. Prepare common functions like print(), get() so you don’t have to type in everytime.
4. Use IDE to code faster and better.
5. Have a clear mind and think logically step by step as if you would solve the problem manually. Try to code that and then enhance it to satisfy the time and space requirements.
6. Learn a lot about the complexities, how they are calculated so that you can apply them quickly and code efficiently.
7. Enjoy whatever you type and code. Every program in CodeVita you try to solve will definitely enhance your programming skills in a great way.
And finally as always , Happy Coding !!
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