Hello
Friends,
This
is Ashutosh, Absar and Nikita from ABES Engineering College, Ghaziabad. We were
the third runner-ups in the very first edition of CodeVita.
Here
we are with our wonderful journey of CodeVita – 2K12.
CodeVita,
one of its kind contest, was announced by TCS last year for the first time.
When we got a promotional mail through the campus commune portal, we were quite
excited to know about the details and waited eagerly for it. Finally the dates
were announced and the registrations started.
Team Formation:
The
team formation in our case was quite interesting. It was just a matter of some
phone calls which brought us altogether. Before that we had never thought of being in a team. Finally we were a team.
Though
we had participated in many inter-college competitions individually but it was the first
online competition for us. The scenario is different in case of online
competition where your code is tested against an online judge. It was a new
thing for us and the practice round helped us a lot to know what exactly the platform
was and how did we need to code. The
advantage with our team was that we all knew to code in both C as well as Java,
though we preferred Java.
After
the registrations were over the dates for the different rounds were announced.
Seeing the huge number of registrations we were little bit nervous.
Round 1:
This
was an online round where you need to code from your place. There were five
problems and we had a time slot of 6 hours to solve them. The questions were
labelled as Easy, Medium and Hard. When we had a first look at the questions,
we thought those could be solved easily. But the real fun began when we solved
the very first question and uploaded it to end up with a “Wrong Answer”. It was
then we realized that we had missed on something. We once again read the
question properly and analysed it to find certain test cases on our own
especially the boundary cases. Then we worked accordingly and now with more
confidence uploaded the question. To our disappointment this time we got a
“Time Limit Exceeded” error. Now we realized that we really need to optimize
the code and a very general approach (brute-force was what we were trying)
would not suffice. Later on after some optimizations we uploaded the code and
finally got “Accepted” status for our first code.
At this stage, we realized that things were not as easy as we thought them to be and
we continued to code the further questions by dividing our work for the problems
and having discussions on the approach as and when needed.
Finally
at the end of our 6 hour slot, we had successfully solved 4 problems. We were
quite relaxed but we had no idea about whether we would be selected for the
further rounds.
The
results were to be announced after 2-3 days. We were waiting for the results.
As the results were announced, we received a mail saying that we had been moved
to the second round. We were too happy but had a very little idea about our
rank. To our surprise, we were on the top of the list in the first round.
It
was now the time for round 2 which was after 4-5 days. We had started preparing
for it from some online coding sites and solved many problems. Finally the day
came.
Round 2:
Here
again there were five problems as in round 1, but obviously the level of
questions was better than that of round 1.
We did not repeat the same mistakes of round 1 and solved the first question
quite fast. Now it was the time for the other questions which were little bit
tough. Finally
we ended up with solving 3 questions correctly and 1 question was almost done
with some small error.
Since
we had solved just three questions and competition was tough, we were
disappointed by our performance and had left all our hopes for the finale.
When
the results were announced we were one of the top 10 teams which were selected
for the finals. We were surprised to know that and finally we were ready to go
for the finale at TCS Sahyadri Park, Pune.
Final Round:
This
was the toughest of all rounds and we had 9 questions to be solved in the same
duration of 6 hours as in the previous rounds. It was very different from the
previous rounds and the competitive environment with all the participants
around us busy in coding made it more challenging. On the top of that, the
challenge was increased when we were told about the live relay of codes to an
audience in a different seminar hall.
After
a long brainstorming session, finally the time was over and we were waiting for
the results to be announced. We were happy to know that we were at the fourth place. Though we could not perform to meet our expectations but still we were
satisfied.
We
were awarded Provisional Job Offer Letter, Internship Offer with TCS R&D,
IEEE Student Membership and a digital photo frame.
After CodeVita:
CodeVita
was a great experience for us which involved a lot of fun and learning (and of
course coding). It helped us to gain confidence and thus we participated in
many online competitions on CodeChef and HackerRank which is still continuing.
We
all have now completed our B.Tech(CSE). Absar and Nikita are now a part of
TCS family and I am continuing my further studies (M.Tech CSE @IIT Guwahati).
We
are thankful to TCS for organising such a great event and also to Mr. Amol
Khanapurkar who provided us this opportunity to share our experience.
Now
its time for the second edition of the event which is being conducted at a much
larger scale. If you have little interest in coding you should surely give it a
shot. It’s a wonderful opportunity which should not be missed in any case.
The
experience makes us to wish that we could be one of the participants in this edition too.
Few Guidelines:
- Read the problem carefully and consider all the cases (even the worst ones you can think of).
- File handling, Error handling, I/O operations and Input validations are the areas you should be comfortable with.
- Avoid wasting time searching for the solutions of the questions on internet. Rather try to work out on your own and write your own code.
- Plagiarism is prohibited, so don’t share you code even with your best friend as it may land up both of you in trouble and may even lead to disqualification.
- Use the same version of compilers as specified as those will be used on the online judge irrespective of the version you are using.
- Never be in hurry and don’t panic. Stay calm while solving the problems.
All
the Best for CodeVita’13!!!
KEEP
CODING !!!
