I attended a PHP programming competition last Sunday just to try my luck. One of the reasons is also because there wasn’t any representative from FIST and one lecturer asked me to join and get some experience.
I never join any competition for almost 12 years and that was a story telling competition I joined during my primary school. I was nervous at first cause this is a competition open to all including professional programmers and “aliens“.
I also attended the seminar on Saturday hoping to learn something new. Some of the topic was very interesting and indeed teach me a lot of new things. However one thing I don’t like about the seminar is that one of the speakers gave his talk in BM. We have participants from other country and people like me also having hard time digesting the talk.
We have number of groups ranging from university students to working people joining the competition. It’s almost impossible for newbie like us to get the consolation prize.
Look at all the pros. It’s really like “David and the Goliath”. Guess who is the Goliath? Who is David?
Looking at the prize money really give you the motivation to continue. (I know it’s little, nvr mind larr…)
The competition goes like this. We have 6 hours to answer 6 questions. They will give us the questions in order. You must solve the question on hand in order for you to get the next question. You are allow can only submit your answer once and not allow to make any changes.
The first question was hard enough; everyone was scratching their head trying to solve that “appetizer question”. The question difficulty increases as we move on. Most people skip question skip question 2 where you need to do pagination. Luckily we can solve that and score high marks for that question.
We weren’t doing good as we spent too much time on one of the question and it can’t run on the organizer server. Interestingly, we can still get 3rd place. We never thought that we can even get consolation prize in the first place.
Well, this is the glass plate and also RM500 for getting 3rd place. Not bad huh…
p/s: The picture of us holding the “cheque” is blur cause the fela that took our picture were trembling, seeing “David has beaten the Goliath”. ;X
