Sean Mountcastle

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.

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NoVA JUG held a special session on Thursday night where Tom Copeland presented on PMD and Dave Thomas provided an introduction to Ruby on Rails. Held concurrently was the initial meeting of the NoVA Ruby Users Group — of which I hope there will be more meetings.

Tom’s overview of PMD focused primarily on CPD, the copy-paste detector. He showed how to run PMD/CPD and what the results look like (there are a number of plugins for IDEs to run PMD as well as an ant task).

Dave gave a high-level overview of Rails and showed how quickly you can get webapps up and running using Rails. He focused on the benefits of Rails from a Java developer’s perspective (since that was the primary audience). He also discussed the Ruby programming language since many of the attendees were not familiar with it. Overall, I think he did an excellent job and many folks went away eager to try out Rails.