ITSA and IETE clubs of Sardar Patel Institute Of Technology organized a competitive coding webinar on 3rd October, 2020. They invited none other than Mr. Jayant Yadav an alumni of IIT Dhanbad, a six star coder on Codechef who currently works as a software engineer at Google. He won the Amazon Coding Wizard ML Hackathon and was a semifinalist at Google CodeJAM.
Mr. Jayant started of with a quick introduction about himself . The organizers had prepared a list of questions for him. On being asked about the importance of competitive coding he elaborated over how competitive coding inculcates the art of critical thinking in a person. People who are experienced with programming tend to have better debugging and quick thinking skills than the rest. On being asked how does coding help in placements he spoke about the coding rounds every nultinational company has.
He also mentioned a few questions during the coding rounds which he appeared for various companies. He also advised the viewers to make it a habit to solve one problem everyday to crack these coding rounds. Not only this but he also gave some coding tricks and tips they need to have up their sleeve to get into their dream company. On being asked about the language popular in the competitive coding circuit he spoke about C++ being the most popular one. He also added that one should code in any language they are comfortable with. On being asked about his journey he spoke about how regularly how he use to practice competitive coding and participate in almost every contest he came across. He also mentioned about some extremely useful websites like Codechef, Codeforces and LeetCode where an aspiring competitive coder can strengthen his/her skills.
The 100 odd attendees were engaged throughout the webinar and on being given a chance, one of the most popular questions was, ‘How important is it to master data structures when it comes to competitive programming?’ He spoke about how data structures has helped him in devising solutions quickly. He also emphasized upon the importance of graph data structure on which the toughest questions are based.
On being asked about the contests he participated in, he spoke about how he used to compete in every CodeChef challenge and after a point of time he started receiving global ranks. He also spoke about Google’s CodeJAM and what kind of topics are targeted in their questions. He also spoke about important topics in Maths one should study which would be of great use during such mega competitions. The attendees were given tips to crack the google coding rounds during placements which are considered to be the toughest of all.
The webinar concluded with providing inspiration to the budding competitive coders and advising them to solve as many as problems they can because there is no shortcut for mastering competitive coding. It’s all about constant practice.
”People who attended the webinar gave us positive feedbacks and got a deep insight of the world of competitive coding. The speaker did a tremendous job in inspiring these budding competitive coders by sharing his experiences and giving them the necessary tips and tricks which would be of great help in their journey.”, said Mohsin, organizer.