Ruby and Programming Contests

A lightning talk I gave at the Ottawa Ruby Group about writing programming contests in Ruby.

Transcript

1. Interested in becoming a better programmer?
2. Interested in becoming a better programmer? Practice!
3. Ruby + Programming Contests Tristan Hume
4. What are these "Programming Contests" of which you speak?
5. What are these "Programming Contests" of which you speak? A programming contest is a timed challenge where you are given a number of problems which you must write code to solve.
6. Secret: Programming contests are actually test driven development in disguise. (With a bit of math and algorithms thrown in)
7. (Very Easy) Example Problem
8. Ruby Solution 8 Lines
9. Programming ContestsMake you better. Make you faster. Make your code faster. Make your code less buggy. Make you smarter.
10. Ruby is a great language to write contests in.
11. Remember that 8 line Ruby solution?
12. Java Solution 34 Lines
13. Q.E.D
14. Ruby - Rails
15. Ruby = Goodies!
16. Ruby = Goodies!
17. My Favorite Methods IO.read Array#combination Array#rotate Enumerable#map Enumerable#inject Array#uniq! Array#flatten Array#sort String#to_i Integer#gcd
18. Other Handy Stuff: Bugless loops VS
19. Other Handy Stuff: Pretty Print
20. TL;DR: Ruby is awesome and you should try programming contests.
21. Some Online Contests You Should Try • The Google Code Jam. (My personal favorite) ◦ Write it in any language. Run it on your own computer. ◦ Multiple rounds. Win stuff if you do well. ◦ http://code.google.com/codejam/ • TopCoder ◦ Constant online contests with the best in the world. ◦ Get ranked and see how your skills compare. ◦ http://www.topcoder.com • Project Euler ◦ More practice than contest. Highly math focused. ◦ http://projecteuler.net
22. Thank you. (Slides available at http://tinyurl.com/rubycontests)