Curious case of Facebook Hackathon
Who knows about ongoing facebook hackathon?
It is in it's 2nd second year and I had many hopes from it. Last year, in its first avatar, it was almost a disappointment. But since it facebook, even in its disappointment, the problems were good and to solve them was fun.
This year, i must say, i feel more disappointed. Don't take me wrong, the execution of the event was quite good. I am not able to make peace with just one rule. The only rule which makes or breaks your solutions. The rule is, you can submit your solution within a period of 6 minutes after downloading the input. This i feel is madness...utter and complete madness. A bit too dramatic in my head, i sound.
Let me tell you why all this kolaveri..
A person spends quite some time, energy and sleep in case of Indians, just to be a part of such events. I would hope, like any other event of this kind, I am allowed to make some mistakes.
A person who works fast, makes mistake, and adapts fast, is a good person to have on your side. This is coming from the philosophy of fail quickly, fail fast. But if you tell me, i can submit my solution only once, and thats it. It becomes a problem for me. I spend more time looking at my code for corner cases then actually testing it.
In my past experience with such events, I have seen this issue addressed by simply allowing the user to upload the code and trying to execute the code on the receivers side. This is the most accepted solution for coding competitions. The other solution, if you want to remove the server side is, providing different inputs every time someone downloads the input and check for the output accordingly. I understand this means dealing with a lot more input downloads and solution uploads, but you will at least get away with blog entries like mine.
This is coming from my experience, single syntax mistake makes your couple of hour work go in vain. Almost makes me not participate anymore. But again, its facebook, the problems are good and its fun to race against time. :)
