Friday 25 April 2014

Google Code Jam 14

I was new to programming and I recently started coding in december 2013. I started my coding life with C as it was there in my coming semester in the college and I was told by some friends that it is one of the best programming language when it comes to speed and overall performance.

I recently started doing competitive programming and I got to know about this famous coding competition conducted yearly by the most awesome company Google. At first I thought that I am not good at competitive programming right now so, I will participate next year but then I registered for it as it was free and nothing was going in just registering for it. Then I kept practicing on the Online Judges and other sites like SPOJ,Codechef,Codeforces,Topcoder. In just about a month I was growing rapidly . I started doing some easy problems and as time passed on I also leveled up :) about a week before the Qualification Round is about to begun I started thinking that why wait for next year? I should give it a try. I took it very lightly like I will just participate and see what happens there in the contest.

Then the contest day came 11 April 2014. The contest started at 4:30 AM and I was awake till 5:00 AM just to see the level of the problems and after seeing them I slept and woke up at 10:30 AM . Just after waking up I jumped over my chair , started my laptop and began my day with some fresh coding problems prepared by Google. I started with the easiest one "The Magic Trick".Firstly, I was thinking that I won't be able to do this problem but then I took some time to figure out that it was a simple problem. I coded it and then I got stuck :( when I was submitting my solution I found out that they have an entirely different way to judge my solution as compared to the coding sites I mentioned above . I was a little depressed after seeing that but then I googled it out as to how to submit solution after spending some time I got the method, all what was needed is to use File Handling and after figuring it out I was feeling excited as this concept was used in my previous programming class in my college (I didn't get it during the lecture though :P ) but then I again did some search on how to use file handling and BINGO!!! within minutes I came with the working idea and submitted my solution successfully . I was on cloud 9 that time . At first I just couldn't believe on my eyes that my solution got accepted and I scored my first points I just can't describe that moment . After that I started thinking of submitting some more solutions and surprisingly I managed to solve the problem B also and scored the needed 25 points to place myself in the next round ROUND 1 . Woah!!! I cleared the qualification round that too in my first attempt . This was one of the happiest day of my life. I was ranked 15121 among 49066 people who registered for the contest from over 165 countries and 2929 in my country .Later that day I called up my parents to tell them about this achievement and they were also happy to hear such a great news.
My friends also congratulated me and encouraged me to do well in the next round as well .

 I know that next round will not be an easy one. I practiced almost daily for the round 1A and see the round is just about to begun in an hour. I will give my best shot at this and see what happen there in the coding arena . 

Open Source Software - A beginning


These days I am learning how to contribute to open source software .It is fun as well as challenging task as you get to know the source code of some exciting projects and in order to understand them you need to dive into the great pool of code snippet . Its really exciting(I am very much excited just to think of contributing to an existing project) when you use your programming skills to understand or find a bug in the project. I am learning how to use git and github so that I can also contribute towards the success of a project that I like.
I just can't wait to show my coding skills and increase the quality of the projects. So just stay tuned and see a great software developer rising ;)