[fedora-india] request for speaker for our FOSS festival Mukti 2010

[Ankur Sinha]

On Mon, 2010-01-11 at 14:56 +0100, Aanjhan R wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 4:09 AM, Debayan Banerjee <debayanin at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 2010/1/8 sankarshan <foss.mailinglists at gmail.com>
> >>
> >> I might not be comprehending this properly. Why would participating in
> >> online coding contests be a deterrent to contributing to Free and Open
> >> Source Software ?
> >
> > People who participate in programming contest arenas spend a lot of time
> > getting accustomed to the arena rules and keep practicing whenever they are
> > free. These arenas have a ranking schemes which require consistent
> > performance. If you are a student, you generally choose what you want to do
> > with your free time.
> 
> [OT] Does this rule of chosing what you want to do with your free time
> only applicable to students? ;)
> 
> > Why dont these people choose to contribute to free software instead? The
> > biggest reason is the learning curve. Going through the process of
> > interacting with developers online, making sure that a particular feature is
> > indeed required and then going to work on it.
> 
> One of those flash questions I get. What's stopping in getting things
> done the other way round as well? Like students involved in OpenSource
> development taking part in programming contests? From your description
> of Open Source involvement it is very similar to a corporate model.
> You cant get to write a AFS (Aanjhan File System) right away which is
> fair enough. You are first put in testing, then into module
> development and then into hardcore research teams depending on your
> performance. So I see a BIG plus when students involved in Open Source
> also take part in programming contests and improve/trigger their
> algorithmic implementation circuits of their brain.
> 
> Just my 2 paisa.
> 
> --
> A

hey,

It's very normal for folks to go into algorithms and problem solving
using programming. Stuff like the topcoder and GCJ rounds are
*thrilling* (even to watch when you've been kicked out in the previous
round ;) ) 

Programming to contribute to Open source isnt the only fun thing around.
Coding competitions help improve the way we code, the way we think, the
way we optimize our code and a lot more. They also teach you to think
out of the box since the conventional "brute force" is never good enough
for a large problem set. GCJ permits you to use "any tool freely
available". I learnt usage of libgmp because of the huge huge input sets
they have for example. 

I haven't been able to give much time to coding competitions because of
all the work building up but I'd sure love to hop on and learn new algos
and techniques :)

my 2cents

regards,
Ankur