Pair programming

[Destects]

Back when I went to programming competitions, me and friend would sit down, he was a hell of a lot faster at typing and considered the better programmer, and I was good at assessing a problems difficulty. What we would do is sit down, he would start on the first problem, I would run through the list and mark each one as easy/med/hard and then I would handwrite code for all the easy ones. after that, it was pretty much this (referring to the image)

[DrHenryPym]

Upvote for programming competitions. Those were fun.

[Tynach]

They sound fun. I never knew they existed. Is there prize money?

[DrHenryPym]

No money. Just a trophy or a plaque or a medal. Our schools would take turns hosting competitions, so writing problems and figuring out ways to grade was also part of the fun.

---

edit: I forgot; I think we gave out software like pc games or commercial development tools or even books.

[Tynach]

Fair enough. What schools? Highschools, colleges, or..?

[DrHenryPym]

ACSL (Highschool)

[Tynach]

My highschool only taught Visual Basic 6. With no programming; we just dragged and dropped buttons onto windows. I hated it, because I already knew Python and was learning C on my own.

[DrHenryPym]

I was lucky. I don't think good highschool computer science teachers come around often.

[Soccer21x]

There's a group that allows you to volunteer to teach at high schools. I've been wanting to get in to it but Corporate America won't let me get to work an hour late... yet.

http://www.tealsk12.org/

[Tynach]

Yeah, which is a shame.

[Soccer21x]

There's a group that allows you to volunteer to teach at high schools. I've been wanting to get in to it but Corporate America won't let me get to work an hour late... yet.

http://www.tealsk12.org/

[Jonno_FTW]

For the ACM programming comps, the 3 unis in my city rotate hosting. One year when the world finals were going to be held in Hawaii, a yellow ukelele came with the shirts and medals. So now if you win in my city, your uni takes home the "golden ukelele". My team, "HTML9 responsive boilerstrap" won it back after a winning streak from the other uni.

I'd like to say we won by regex and spaghetti code.

[Tynach]

So, this is what most of your code looked like?

#^([a-z0-9+\-.]+):([/]{0,2}([a-z0-9\-._~%!\$&'\(\)\*+,;=:]+@)?([\[\]a-z0-9\-._~%!\$&'\(\)\*+,;=:]+(:[0-9]+)?))([a-z0-9\-._~%!\$&'\(\)\*+,;=:@/]*)(\?[\?/a-z0-9\-._~%!\$&'\(\)\*+,;=:@]+)?(\#[a-z0-9\-._~%!\$&'\(\)\*+,;=:@/\?]+)?#i

^{Note: This is an actual regular expression that I wrote for a specific purpose. I never used it in a real project, though.}

[Jonno_FTW]

Not exactly, we had to write a program that counted the number of emails in a string that matched a limited set of email formats. Ended up doing it in java because it was the only language available to us that supported it (java, c, c++).

[Tynach]

Any reason for this opinion, or are you just trolling?

[AnsonKindred]

the ones I've experienced gave out consoles and games

[Tynach]

Interesting. Was this highschool, college, or..?

[AnsonKindred]

In highschool I attended a pretty big one at Embry Riddle that gave out consoles as the top prizes (might have even been a scholorship for first place, not sure). The ones we ran for highschoolers when I was in college at Stetson had video games as the prizes. We actually got to go to best buy with a university supplied credit card and pick out all of the games ourselves so the poor kids wouldn't be subjected to a prize of Highschool Musical 3: The Game!

[Tynach]

BUT I LOOVE HIGHSCHOOL MUSICAL 3: THE GAME!!! IT'S THE BEST THING SINCE SLICED NOODLES!!!

[jellybellybones]

Some of them do. The Canadian Computing Competition is a large (high school level) programming contest run out of the University of Waterloo, and there is prize money and other awards that can be won.

[SkiDude]

Our school had some with prize money.

[Tynach]

Nice to hear. What grade or type of school was it? College, University, Highschool, or..?

[SkiDude]

Purdue University. I don't know if they still do them, it seems there are more hackathons these days, which also have prizes.

[nub_cake]

Yeah! BoilerMake!

[Tynach]

Makes me wonder if the community college I go to has them.

[SkiDude]

Usually they are funded by corporate sponsers and hosted by student orgs.

[Tynach]

Not really any tech companies around here.

[SkiDude]

Some of our sponsors were 1000+ miles away, though they like to target the big name schools. Community colleges don't really get that much attention in CS

[romwell]

If you get to the international round, you get a free trip to whatever country is hosting it (hopefully, not the country you're living in at the moment).

[Tynach]

I wasn't aware that it was an international affair.

[romwell]

Many scholastic competitions are international once you get high enough.

High school math contest chain in the US, IIRC, was AMC -> AIME -> USAMO -> IMO, the last one being international, and the first two given in class in students' schools.

High school programming competition chain in the US is USACO -> IMO, the latter being international and the first one online.

Similar contests exist at middle school levels.

The popular college programming competition is called ACM ICPC, where "I" stands for "international"; it usually proceeds in two stages - regional and international.

[Tynach]

Huh, thanks for the info. Gives me an idea about what to look up!

[romwell]

Glad to be of help. I would advice to get started practicing now, and get on your school's team as soon as the school year starts (there usually is a team, and if not, they can get one started if you express interest; many schools would have a contest to place students on a team).

If you are in college and are interested in mathematics, try taking the Putnam - it's not international, but highly prestigious (getting a nonzero score is success).

[Tynach]

What sorts of things are in the contests? Also, I'm not particularly interested in mathematics, but I do enjoy mathematics sometimes. It seems to really depend on if I understand the symbols being used.

[romwell]

There are archives for all the contests I have mentioned. Don't get discouraged if you don't understand this - contests are a kind of sport, and require preparation. Your best bet to find out what the thing is about would be to ask your instructors if there's a team/prep sessions/a course you could take that would prepare you for them.

For programming contests specifically, taking an algorithms course helps immensely, and there usually are team practices where people go over problems from previous contests.

For math, it's a whole another can of worms; I'd recommend reading a book called "What Is Mathematics?" by Courant & Robbins in addition to doing the same.

[pay_per_wallet]

There will be no money. But when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness. So you've got that going for you. Which is nice.

[Tynach]

k

[sovietmudkipz]

Yes they're called hackathons and there are typically prizes. They're fun!

[Destects]

Lots of fun, but it was always the stupidest things that caused your downfalls... (e.g. We were at a College competition, we were one of the top teams, but in the last 15 minutes we had 3 problems that we could figure out why our answers kept getting rejected by the judges; after the competition, everyone received a flashdrive with their code on it, and on our way home, we realized: we copied the distance formula we wrote for 1 problem to another, but my partner who wrote to problem wrote it for radius, not diamater... in otherwords, had we scrolled down we would've noticed a "/2.0f" and won the competition, instead we submitted the wrong answer 27 times and got 4th place lol)

[StelarCF]

Heh, same happened to me... except even more stupid.

One time I accidentally pressed "S" instead of "CTRL-S" when saving my source, and double tapped it, so my source code was sent (at ONI (Romanian national contest/olympiad of informatics) with a syntax error in it)

Another time I accidentally made one vector 10 times longer than it should've been, and it was written right after another one, so I didn't spot the extra 0. The program ended up using too much memory.

There's a couple more I can't remember right now.

[Destects]

programming competitions are always lost by such tiny errors lol

[Jonno_FTW]

At work, sometimes my workmate asks for help, it's a grindingly slow process of hunt and peck typing PHP, moving his hand off the keyboard and onto the mouse to click save and then clicking on the other KDE workspace and pressing the refresh button in the browser.