Last night we had excellent turn-out at the Northern VA Ruby Users Group. Rich Kilmer gave an enlightening talk on Domain Specific Languages and Devin Mullins delivered an interesting performance piece on Rails plugins where he wrote code while singing about it (ensuring that the code matched his meter and rhyme).
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Last night I participated in a “code fest” sponsored by my employer. It was great fun and the code fest was powered by TopCoder. This was my first time participating in any sort of coding competition and while I didn’t make the top three, I did place in the top ten. I’m definitely looking forward to the next company sponsored event in February.
For those of you not familiar with TopCoder, they basically provide a Java application/applet called the Competition Arena. Once you login to the arena, you can then register for a Single Round Match (SRM, in TopCoder parlance), but only during the registration window (which appears to be two hours prior to the event). Once the event begins you have 75 minutes to solve problems of increasing difficulty. Each problem set is assigned a certain number of points (usually 250, 500 and 1000). You are judged both on the correctness of your program as well as the time it took you to develop and test it.
Ever since I started playing video games at an early age, I always wanted to develop them. I had my first taste of this in grade school when I figured out how to modify some of my favorite games by editing the data files in a hex editor. In high school, I bought myself a copy of Borland Turbo Pascal (and then later Turbo C++) and taught myself how to program–building rudimentary games. For college, my mother really wanted me to become a lawyer so I decided that the best way to get there was to major in political science. While I did well, I just wasn’t really interested in it. So in my junior year I changed my major to computer science. Of course, I had already chosen my university based on their reputation for political science and law and as such the computer science curriculum wasn’t the best.
Since freshman year I had been running a MUD (I had to finagle an account on the engineering Ultrix machines as I wasn’t in the School of Engineering–we also weren’t supposed to be running servers either but I had some crafty ways to hide my work from the TAs). In my junior year I built a raycasting engine and a simple FPS (similar to Wolfenstein 3D). While I continued to follow the game industry and read-up on the newest techniques from folks like Michael Abrash, John Carmack, Andre LaMothe, etc. my foray into game development was still-born. In my senior year I took an internship at the Naval Research Lab and was pigeon-holed into telecommunications from that point on (I believe I’ve finally escaped, though I’m currently working on some very interesting and vital Internet infrastructure).
Anyway, you didn’t come here to read about me and my failed attempts at game development, you want to know about interviewing at EA’s Mythic Studio in Fairfax, VA. Home to Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC) and the upcoming Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (WAR).
