Extreme Startup Coding Competition
“I thought I’d never say a coding competition is fun – I was wrong.”
Our last Houston day wrote a new chapter to history books: We held our first coding competition using a concept called Extreme Startup. I think this quote from one of the participants says it all: “I thought I’d never say a coding competition is fun – I was wrong.”
Introducing the competition.
Extreme Startup is a concept created by Robert Chatley and Matt Wynne. We found out about it when Johannes Brodwall demonstrated it at Tampere Goes Agile. From there we got the inspiration to try it ourselves. The competition works like this:
- One machine acts as a question server
- Participants register the URL of their own web servers with the question server
- Question server starts sending questions as HTTP GET requests with specific intervals
- Players need to return the correct answer as a HTTP response
An easy question could be e.g. ‘what is 2 plus 4′. You’d think you could just write ’6′ as a response and you’d be correct. But when the next question is ‘what is 3 plus 5′ you actually have to implement a program for answering these questions.
“And that’s just the beginning.”
The vanilla version of the server contains six levels of questions with increasing difficulty. The facilitator switches the game to the next level when he feels that the players need more challenge. New more demanding questions start flowing from the server. Sounds simple, right?
The leaderboard
At the beginning players have no idea what kind of questions the server will give them. Neither do they have any idea how the scoring system works. Yet you should make some kind of a design! Correct answers increases the scores and certain other responses give penalty points. And all the time the leaderboard is visible to all participants.
“While the facilitator is shouting a countdown you feel your fingers moving faster than ever before.”
Imagine the feeling when your team is couple of points behind the leading team but only a few points ahead of the third. While the facilitator is shouting a countdown you feel your fingers moving faster than ever before. You are ready to do anything to get one more question correct and take the lead. If the clock only had couple of more seconds in it and hopefully my latest change doesn’t break any old answers…
If the amount of talk after the event could be used to define the success, then this was a great experience! Few even continued coding after the competition just to prove themselves how it could have been done without the stress. One of the participants commented:
“I woke up on Saturday morning irritated by the code I had written the day before. To my girlfriend’s delight I just had to write a better version while still in bed!”
Hectic, stressful, and hasty were just couple of adjectives used after the competition. But one adjective rose above others:
FUN!
Competition winners!
So what’s next?
- We’ll give you a peek to the actual results of this competition
- We’ll definitely do more of these…
- …and we might give YOU an opportunity to challenge us!
So stay tuned!
Esko Pylsy
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2 Responses to “Extreme Startup Coding Competition”
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November 16th, 2011 at 12:06 pm
“Fun” is the adjective I most often hear in association with Extreme Startup as well.
My fork of the server has a variation: Instead of metering out questions, we bombard the participants with all the questions as soon as the warm-up round is over. We also have a couple of questions that get progressively harder and questions that are designed so they have no correct answer.
All this leads to more chaos and probably more frustration. But in the end, people learn a lot about their own behavior under stress.
November 17th, 2011 at 7:43 am
I myself am fascinated by chaos and as a facilitator I love to stretch the participants to their limits. So I’m definitely going to check your fork, thanks for the tip!
We have a lot of ideas to improve this concept further. At least we are going to introduce a nicer GUI with some functional improvements as well. One of the comments we got from participants was that the questions were too mathematical. So our goal is to introduce more non-mathematical questions as well.
It’s actually very interesting how this concept can be applied to very different types of situations. One can do a full coding competition quite easily, but on the other hand it can used to hold workshops, dojos etc. So much potential that I just wish I’d have more time to play around with this.
We’ll keep you posted on how we make progress with Extreme Startup!