I would like to share in this post my experience participating in the Google HashCode for the first time. It's an experience I recommend to every person that loves challenges. Although it is hard to win, it's really exciting to take part on the competition!
It was my first big hackathon and I was really excited. The Google Developer Group in my university organized a hub and me and my teammates decided to join. We were so many people that we had some troubles with the internet connection, but somehow we managed to get the problem text.
My team was composed by 4 people, counting myself, and we were going to use an online platform to work on it together. However, due to the bad internet connection in the place, we had to work offline. So first we talked about how were we going to approach the problem. When we had the design of the algorithm, we decided to divide the work in groups of 2, each group would solve one part of the problem. Also, we decided to use Java as the solving language, since we all had good skills with it.
Using Java for that problem wasn't maybe the best idea, though. When we tried to mix the code we had been working on, we encountered some unexpected problems. The bad internet connection wasn't helping at all.
After solving the problems, we ran out of time, so we didn't have time to improve the algorithm. The hackathon was 4 hours long, but it seemed way less.
We didn't win, of course, however I had a really nice time and now I feel more prepared for the Google HashCode 2019!
Top comments (3)
Dang, that's tough. Did you have downloaded offline docs?
We had to use one of my teammates' mobile data to download them... The organizers didn't expect so many people to come and the internet connection was really horrible xD
Its a bummer, but at the end of the day going to the hackathon and enjoying the experience is the most important.
I had a similar experience, went to a 48 hour hackathon and the first 6 hours the WIFI didn't work due to having ~twice as many people than they expected (250 vs 500)