Codevita Guidelines from Winners of 2012

Hello Everyone,

     This is Akshay, Abhay and Rhushikesh from Walchand College of Engineering, Sangli. We stood 1st in Codevita in it's very first version last year which was like the best thing happened with us till date. We would like to share our wonderful experience with you all.

Begin:

     It all started when TCS started promoting about their very first National Level Coding challenge - Codevita 2012. When we heard about it, we thought to register for it and we were like 'it's National level programming contest man and how can we win it?' (This is our Negative Mind that speaks!). Many of you might be thinking like that currently. But, ultimately we registered because we were inspired by the thought,

" You Miss 100% of the shots that you don't take! "

 And I guess, everyone of you should follow the same.

     Team Formation: We are not going to advise on this. But, it would be great if you form a team in way that your team members are quite comfortable in at least 2 languages. Because there are some things that can be done easily in specific language. Abhay was C Expert, Rhushikesh and I preferred Java.

Journey:

{
     After all registration process, the date of 1st round was announced and it was on the day before our In-Semsester exam at College. We were thinking whether should we attempt or not. But, again we gave a shot which ultimately paid off. 

     The online coding round system was new to us, as we all had experience of Inter-college competitions. The Major difference between such competitions and online coding round is, in later you can not convience unless it's perfectly right. In case of online coding round, your code gets tested against the Test cases that are already generated. So, your code has to go successfully throught each and every test case, otherwise it will not get accepted.

Coding Rounds:

     You might be knowing the rules and guidelines by now. In first round we had 5 problems statements to solve. And after reading them, we thought they were quite easy. But, after creating solution file and uploading it we got error message that, Wrong Answer !

     Then we realized that you need to re-look all edge cases and corners for our code to get 'Accepted'. It's very important to read the Problem statement very carefully, otherwise you will surely miss some part of it and later you won't find that because of your ignorance. After the end of first round we were not sure about our selection for the second round.

     When the results of the First round were announced, We started looking from bottom of the list to find our name(Like the same scene from '3 idiots' !). Totally, 269 students were shortlisted for the second round of it. And we were not in 200-269, then 100-200 but at last we found our team standing at 12th place. So, we were really enthusiastic about second round now.

     The second round was very similar to first one but difficulty level was higher than that of first one. We gave our best but we thought if they select around 30-40 for the final round then we might get selected. And when the results of second round were out, we stood 9th and they had selected only 10 for the final round and were invited at TCS Sahyadri Park, Pune for the Final round.

Now, it was really getting hotter as it was final round and we were among Top 10 from all over India. Certainly it was a great feeling and we were quite contained with it. But, Thanks to All our Friends who encouraged us to go and Win it all.

Final Round:

      Yes, it was Sahyadri Park, TCS, Pune. It was great atmosphere and it was TCS where we could visit. It was a great place where we all had to code to win. The Final round was of 6 hours and the level of difficulty was even more than previous rounds. This was the chance where we could prove ourselves. We put our best in final round and ultimately we were the Winners. One just needs to be Cool and not panic in such rounds.

}

End:

     For us the End of Codevita is like Beginning of the new Journey as it opened Many new opportunities for us. First thing - We had Apple - iPads, TCS - provisional offer letters, IEEE student membership accounts. TCS also gave us opportunity to do Internship at Tata Research Development and Design Center, Pune which is the first Research and Development lab of TCS in India. The internship was a really bronze experience for all of us. We worked with senior scientists and learned a lot from them. Thanks to TCS and TRDDC for that.

We are really thankful to all TCS for providing such a huge opportunity. And as they are doing it again, we must say you should participate in this competition and don't miss this opportunity !!

Few Guidelines:
     1. If you want to practice or get feel of such competition then there are many websites like codechef, hackerrank which can provide a helpful experience.
     2. Read problem statement very carefully. (Don't miss out any statement)
     3. Think about all the test cases. (Never think Internet will help you solving a problem statement)
     4. Be comfortable with file handling and basic input output operations that are required.
     5. Solve easy problem statement first, instead of going into complicated things.
     6. Keep it simple.

You can reach any of us at:

Akshay Mohite, Abhay Doke, Rhushikesh Apte
And  for details of Codevita 2013, you can contact Amol Khanapurkar

All the Best for Codevita 2013 !!