Dr. Dobb's Journal - June 2008 - (Page 17)

d06lead_p4db.qxp 4/11/08 8:27 AM Page 17 TopCoder Winners compete to solve multicore or mobile problems, artificial life or fractal coding or robotics challenges, or participate in a Super Mario contest. I’m not sure what that last one is. If you feel like brushing the cobwebs off your Apple II chops, you can easily find an Apple II competition. If you get bit by that “running light without overbyte” bug, there’s a contest in which your entry must solve a set problem in no more than 1K of 6502 code. And 4K of Java. Dr. Dobb’s has put on a variety of programming contests over the years: Currently, the Dr. Dobb’s Challenge has a prize pool of $10,000. Some contests are just not all that serious—like the International Obfuscated C Code Contest. The fact that the rules contain deliberate typos tells you a lot about that competition, which was jointly inspired by the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest and some execrable examples of C code. Then there’s OMGWTF, the “Olympiad of Misguided Geeks at Worse Than Failure Programming Contest,” where the goal is to solve a simple problem in the most obscenely convoluted way possible. More seriously, there’s the Loebner Prize competition. Win the ultimate challenge there and you’ll get $100,000, a gold medal, and considerable fame—because the ultimate challenge-winning code merely has to pass the Turing Test. Programmers Heaven holds weekly contests. In short, there is no lack of opportunities to test or flaunt your programming skills. TopCoder Competition can be the most nerve-racking experience. Some people just thrive on it. —Itzhak Perlman So what’s the experience of participating in these contests? “Exciting, exhilarating, heart pounding, brain crunching, mouth drying, donot-want-to-miss-a-second-of-it-good,” according to one veteran competitor, who participates regularly in TopCoder’s competitions under the name AleaActaEst. “It can also be painful, dejecting, and anxiety ridden ” Another thing that it can be is profitable. TopCoder competitor argolite made roughly half a million dollars competing last year, according to TopCoder’s player stats, which, because the process is as much about evaluating individual programmers as it is about producing software, are remarkably extensive—arguably more detailed than baseball stats. TopCoder is emblematic of this new contest-based approach to commercial software development. Back in 2001, the founders were running a contract software development operation that had grown to the point where they were managing a pool of over 600 programmers. They faced two challenges: To find a better way to evaluate programmers and to move in the direction of a true engineering process, based on a component architecture model. The solution they hit on for both problems was programming contests. “We think,” says TopCoder’s Chief Architect Dave Messinger, “that this is June 2008 l www.ddj.com l Dr. Dobb’s Journal 17 http://www.ddj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - June 2008

Dr. Dobb's Journal - June 2008 Contents Friday Night Fish Fry Alia Vox Developer Diaries There Must Be Contest Conversations Building a Test Harness for RTOS QT and Windows CE Software to Hardware Parallelization Performance Portable C++ Effective Concurrency The Agile Edge Swaine's Flames

Dr. Dobb's Journal - June 2008

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