Tuesday 20 March 2012

Still Here! Kinda...

Hey all!

  Ok, it's been awhile.  Work is occupying most of my free time (go figure), even as I look out the window and see the 20C+ weather outside!  Sigh.

  I hope to get back at this sometime soon.

  The one cool thing I've been looking into (that I've overlooked in years past) is Google's annual Code Jam contest.  I've been going through the practice problems and actually faring all right (I'd say about an 80-90% success rate), which, for me, is making me feel pretty awesome as I've been out of school for some 7-8 years now (yes, the problems do make you feel like you're in school sometimes; is that good or bad?).

  I strongly suggest checking it out and even trying out some of the practice problems, if for no other reason than to keep your coding and problem solving skills in shape (you can use any language that has a "free" compiler; my weapon of choice is C++ with the good ol' STL using g++).

  If you feel so inclined, drop me a line with your thoughts on some of the problems.  Pay close attention to those problems that are of a graphing nature (determining appropriate data structures to represent graphs is always a great exercise!).  Makes you wonder if something like neo4j would help out (though, there's still the question of developing the actual algorithms, but maybe the canned ones like A*, Dijkstra, etc. can be leveraged, too...interesting.)...

  Ok all, enjoy the not-so-lousy Smarch weather!

  See you next time!