We have finally dropped the curtain on the MobME CodeJam 2011; after 2 weeks of interesting problems and a grand finale at our Kochi office. We finally have a winner – Karthik R; who walks away with the grand prize of Rs 100,000. It was indeed tough to pick one winner from the 200 odd entries we had recieved. But in the end; Karthik had his nose just ahead with the way he approached the problem and how he went about designing the solution. Congrats to him for making it through all these rounds, amidst the tough competition.
And for making that choice tough; the kudos goes not just to the winner and the 12 finalists; but also for every single one of you who participated. We enjoyed reading through all your code. What more can techies like us ask for? 
What impressed us the most was how people came up with elegant solutions to some tough problems. As explained by Vishnu in an earlier post we had intentionally given all our daily problems vague edges. The reasoning behind that was to see how the participants coped with real world engineering requirements that are often vague high-level statements. This made some of the submissions quite interesting to us – to see how people approached the question in different ways. A succesful engineer is someone who can do the same; and I’m happy to say that the current crop of young engineers seem ok. We are in safe hands!
What I probably didn’t like so much about most of the entries in general was the lack of quality documentation and the lack of automated tests. In college, students are still taught on how to write programs for machines. In an enterprise what’s needed is the ability to write code for other human beings. That’s a skill that requires some training and experience; but I am a firm believer that the first steps must be taught during the formative years of an engineer.
Let’s get into some statistics then. We recieved a total of 259 valid submissions over the 14 days. The highest number of submissions were for the first day for which we got around 30 solutions. The language of choice for the participants seemed was Python. Python also took away the crown most number of daily winners. PHP was a distant second; followed closely by Java and Ruby. C had even fewer submissions and we got no submissions written in Clojure.
The CodeJam Language Pie
All said and done; it was a wonderful experience for the team here at MobME to construct all those questions, read the solutions and finally to meet some of the young breed here. We ourselves learnt a lot in the whole process. So on behalf of Nanda, Sherin, Vishnu and the rest of the team in MobME – Thank you for participating and keep coding!
Anoop Sankar is VP, Engineering at MobME Wireless Solutions. He serves as a key interface between engineering and management, responsible for developing strategic planning for direction and control of engineering activities.
Anoop is an engineering graduate from Trivandrum. Prior to working at MobME he served as a software engineer at Robert Bosch working on automotive technology.
