Kevin Bacon
Six Degrees of Separation from Kevin Bacon Code Performance Optimization Contest
It’s another coding contest! Join us and show us your skills.
Who: Anyone! Any age! Professionals and Gurus. Students. Hobbyists. Job and internship candidates!
When: Phase 1 on November 17th 12pm, Phase 2 on December 16th 5pm.
Where: Hawksnest Meeting Room, Affirma Offices @ 3380 146th Pl SE #200, Bellevue, WA 98007
What: We have written a badly written Windows Form app that can be loaded up on Visual Studio 2012, 2013, or 2015. The goal of the contest is to optimize it and make it faster.
The purpose of the app is to start on a specified Starting URL, and find a path of links to the Ending Url in the shortest time possible. The path solution does not have to be the shortest path. The contestant just needs to find a solution in the fastest time possible.
One of the primary goals of this competition is to learn from each other and help everyone improve their debugging and optimization skills. For this purpose, the contest is divided into 2 phases.
Phase 1 of the competition will be held on November 17th, 2015. Phase 1 is a presentation competition. Participants will give a 5-10 minute presentation on how they instrumented and prioritized the problems within the app. Winners will be chosen by the attendees for the most useful presentation. It is up to the participant how much of the secret sauce to reveal. However, to win this part of the contest, you’ll want to give the audience tips that are useful. Participants are required to publish all source code after the presentation. You do not have to be a presenting participant to attend Phase 1. Everyone is welcome.
Phase 2 will be held on December 16th, 2015. You do not have to participate in Phase 1 to participate in Phase 2. A Starting Url and an Ending Url will be chosen by a non-participant at the beginning of the competition. All participants will submit their VS2012 source code. The source code will be compiled on a single computer (or the same class computer), then executed. Prizes will be given out for the fastest apps that find a correct solution. Source code will be published for all winners.
To facilitate cross-learning, participants may enter as individuals or a team of 2 for either phase.
How to get started: Start by registering below. The source code download link will be on the registration confirmation email. Start optimizing. We’ll see you on November 17th, 2015.
Prizes: Drones and Movie Tickets
Other Notes: The purpose of the code contest is to improve our craft by learning from each other. All participants are asked to adhere to this spirit of learning and cooperation. If you are new to coding or a student, we especially invite you to join us and have fun with us. Please feel free to share and forward this contest on to whoever you think may be interested. All participants must be local. We will not have accommodations for remote participation.
Downloads:
Refactored Crawler Code with multi-threading
Please direct questions/concerns to codecontest@affirma.com.
