I received this reminder from Christoph Steindl about the contest, now it its third year. I hope you’ll take a look and even participate!

Do you have a linear performance curve?

As a software developer, if you can choose you’d prefer an algorithm with linear run-time complexity “O(n)” over one with quadratic “O(n²)” or even exponential complexity “O(2^n)”.

As an employer or client, you would prefer software developers who show a linear performance curve even if working under heavy load and stress.

The best developers solve difficult problems with the same speed as simpler ones – their performance curve is linear. On our Hall of Fame you can see for last year’s contest which participants exhibited a quasi linear performance curve, and which ones showed a quadratic or exponential one.

This year, everyone can participate in the Catalysts Coding Contest over the Internet, so it’s a real worldwide competition.

During the last years we had 60 onsite participants, this year we hope to get 100 onsite + remote participants – which would then be a large enough code base to draw some valuable conclusions for our research questions:

• Who is faster? Who is more efficient? Who is more effective? Who is more productive?
• Does “Pair Programming” really make you faster?
• Does “Test-Driven Development” really lead to fewer bugs?
• How many ways are there to solve a problem?
• Which programming language is most appropriate for the problem?
• How many lines of code are necessary?

The contest will take place on Friday, June 5th, in the afternoon. The participation fee is just 1 EUR for remote participants (otherwise we couldn’t probably distinguish real registrations from fake registrations). Please join us!