The competition tag has no wiki summary.
83
votes
11answers
10k views
How to prepare for a programming competition? Graphs, Stacks, Trees, oh my! [closed]
Last semester I attended ACM's (Association for Computing Machinery) bi-annual programming competition at a local University. My University sent 2 teams of 3 people and we competed amongst other ...
77
votes
14answers
3k views
Hiring a programmer much more qualified & experienced than yourself?
My employer is hiring a programmer - more specifically, I am interviewing and selecting the person who will fill the position.
The best candidate right now is far more qualified than I am, older, and ...
28
votes
15answers
2k views
How do you effectively compete with an open source project?
A company with a solid open source project competing against a traditional closed-source product seems impossible to beat.
I read this article wherein the author lays out this scenario:
Suppose ...
23
votes
8answers
2k views
Is the algorithm more important than the programming language?
During the current (2013) Google Code Jam contest, there was a problem that took C++ and Java people 200+ lines of code as compared to Python people that solved the same problem only using 40 lines of ...
15
votes
2answers
2k views
Why is C++ predominant in programming contests and competitions?
I understand that C++ is a very fast language, but ain't C just as fast, or faster in some cases?
Then you might say that C++ has OOP, but the amount of OOP you need for most programming puzzles is ...
13
votes
6answers
1k views
It takes me hours to completely understand solutions to 1000-pt problems on TopCoder. Should I get discouraged? [closed]
Sometimes this applies to the 500-pt ones too. I sometimes start feeling I will never improve enough to code them with ease like the others. Should I just quit? If not, why? It is extremely annoying, ...
5
votes
6answers
230 views
Advice/Wisdom for Programming Competitions. (Specifically the IOI)
I'm on the Irish team heading to the International Olympiad of Informatics in Bulgaria at the start of August, and from the great pools of wisdom of SA, I wish to ask a few questions of those of you ...
4
votes
2answers
244 views
Any good hackathons/competitions to refresh my programming skill? [closed]
I spent this summer as a PM, so my programming skills may have gotten a little rusty.
I want to refresh those skills, and I'm looking for things like online hackathons or competitions. Preferably ...
4
votes
2answers
455 views
Programming Practice/Test Contest?
My situation: I'm on a programming team, and this year, we want to weed out the weak link by making a competition to get the best coder from our group of candidates. Focus is on IEEExtreme-like ...
3
votes
5answers
291 views
How to deal with potential enterpreneur developer in a IT startup
In a software startup, how can we deal with the main developers/programmers of the company who are good at design and communication, and also have entrepreneurial skills?
How do we get them work for ...
3
votes
4answers
121 views
How to handle “X” data sets as input
I participated in a coding competition today, and I found that almost all of the command line input our programs needed to receive would start with an integer representing the amount of data sets to ...
0
votes
1answer
185 views
Is there any benefit of using one language over the other for competitive programming websites like SPOJ or TopCoder? [closed]
I know a bit of C++, Java and Ruby. I want to be proficient in one of these now and I don't know how to pick. I was wondering if picking one over the other would be advantageous in any way for ...
0
votes
2answers
231 views
How much do they study in the best universities, relative to the other universities? [closed]
In my university, our total required weekly attendance (for lectures and tutorials/similar) is about 12 hours. It was like that in the first year, and then everything required extremely little effort ...
-3
votes
0answers
124 views
Visual C++ coding like a NINJA? [closed]
Please view this short youtube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeqRo6HvtUU
skip to 33 seconds
How to make that "auto-replace" feature in Microsoft's visual c++? So that when I type something ...
