eGenting Competition 2006
November 11th, 2006 by
Honestly, I don’t know whats worse, the last time I took a trip up to Genting, or this one. Having a big heavy busy, moving slowly up the mountain to reach its point of destination roaring in agony as it crosses the next bend, isn’t exactly a comforting thought. I am not too fond of buses actually, I tend to get dizzy and a bit sick, plus it doesn’t help that the bus is twisting and turning as it goes up and down the mountain.
Before I talk about the competition, lets talk about the food! Oh boy the food was nice, nyam nyam! But its distracting us from the coding, oh noes! 
when your in coding high thats no good :(. After grabbing a good portion, though not a substantial Aizat portion, I quickly went back to code.
Anyways competition finished a while ago, and I am back home, resting. I was able to finish only 2 out of the 4 questions, which luckily for me were decided to be the 2 hardest ones given the amount of points allocated to it. Though that also means that I was not able to finish the easy ones… For those of you wondering, it was Cashier Activity Report (q2) and the Team Selection (q3).
While the Microcontroller Emulator (q1) and Loan Evaluator (q2) stumped me, as I had no no background on it. Similarly I had not expected them to bring up building a GUI. On the bus ride home, I thought I could have possibly given a shot in it in PHP and build a quick site..doh. Wow, the answers are already up. Fast.
I was expecting These questions were pretty straight forward database, and report questions. Which luckily for me, I am good at :), or well perceive good at… though they do take a while to write goddammit! Similarly I didn’t get to mess around with my Regex foo
Its interesting to note that there were quite a number of girls attending this competition. I would say at least one fourth of the people? Maybe one fifth?. Compared to the general perception of the dominant position of males in the ICT sector, this isn’t quite bad.
I noticed a lot of the students brought in Java and C++ books (like those 3inch text books), and also some C#. The problem I see is that these kids actually decided to bring these books up here! I’ll discuss more on this issue later.
Now for some tips:
Decide on which questions to answer
There is simply not enough time to answer all the questions. Looking at the 2005 Competition question 4. With the given answers, in printed, it consists of over 12 pages. Since I didn’t know threading, and networking I decided to opt out, and pray. Decided which questions are worth scoring first given their difficulty, and points given.
References
Bring proper references! Sure its nice to have text books to help you, but if you don’t know the material already you aren’t going to learn it during the competition period. Unless of course you know what your doing. For those of you that ’slightly’ rely on those text books, bring in reference sheets instead. Photocopy part of the book containing source code. If you OOP you don’t need the OOP section, reduce the amount of searching you have to do.
Less is more
I brought in a good bunch of “cheat sheets” in (basically quick references). The ones I brought are : Ruby, Regular Expressions, MySQL
Also make sure your cheat sheets have mostly everything you need! Sadly I didn’t check and forgot a function or two…doh
Similarly I heard people asking around for the old competition answers, why didn’t anyone bring this? I brought some, but not all. Printed 4pages to a single page as to save paper, allows me to quickly flip through as well. But it was also quite small, maybe 2 per page was a better idea…
As you can tell I’m suggesting on less resources, just make sure they are good resources.
A little tip, tear your Competition paper in half. Half of it is in Malay, other in English. Decide what you want, and remove the other part. Less paper to deal with.
Conclusion
Basically it boils down to the same rules of taking any exam apply here…
For those of you wondering, Yes…I wrote my solutions in Ruby!. Though now I wonder how smart a decision that was… Sadly the questions were too short to make full use of Ruby.
Now let’s hope I win…
Alot of ellipses in this post, guess I’m not confident haha :P.
