Team Name: ench_mango
Team Members: Kelvin & Pi-Hsun Shih
Institution/Organization: National Taiwan University
SnackDown 2015 Rank: ROW 06
Q. CodeChef: When did you start coding and how did you learn?
Kelvin: High school mostly, joined a informatic club and otherwise self-taught for the most part.
Pi-Hsun Shih: When I was 10 years old. I learned VB by reading a book.
Q. CodeChef: Could you name and share your first programming contest experience?
Kelvin: Probably some internal contest when I was in the informatics club hosted by some random guy (who is known as tmt514 today)!. I came in the contest oddly confident considering it’s my first time, probably due to I solved ~200 easy problems on UVa judge and thought I am ready to earn turing award. Not surprisingly I was crushed in terms of the number of problems I solved — only around half of them. But still I’m really happy, that’s when I became even surer that the thrill of competitive programming will never part with me.
Pi-Hsun Shih: My first programming contest experience was some contest in senior high school.
Q. CodeChef: How often do you code on any given day & weekend?
Kelvin: 6+ hours on average?
Pi-Hsun Shih: Depends on whether there’s programming contest or not 😀
Q. CodeChef: What was the biggest hurdle on your road to where you are today?
Kelvin: Don’t feel anything on the road is a hurdle. It’s either pain or fun or neither, but whichever it is it’s what the road is made of.
Pi-Hsun Shih: .
Q. CodeChef: What do you think biggest mistake competitive programmers make?
Kelvin: Other than integer overflow, reading the problem statement wrong, wrongly allocating array size, forgetting to return, and typing i instead of j? It must be ignoring girlfriend for 24 hours because we had to participate in some day-long contest, then :D.
Pi-Hsun Shih: Getting nervous and write a hard solution for an easy problem.
Q. CodeChef: What programming language do you use and why?
Kelvin: C++ in competitive programming for it’s efficiency and I don’t like java much.
Pi-Hsun Shih: For programming contest: C++. Just used to it. For other: Ruby!
Q. CodeChef: What advice do you have for other competitive programmers?
Kelvin: Use 50216 or 514 as your random seed. Brings good luck.
Pi-Hsun Shih: .
Q. CodeChef: What do you like the most about CodeChef? and what would you don’t like in it?
Kelvin: I don’t really compete on CodeChef much, still. There are many languages one can choose, which is nice; On the other hand based on my limited experience competing on CodeChef, the browsing interface is a bit awkward..
Pi-Hsun Shih: Haven’t used CodeChef much, so nothing to say.
Q. CodeChef: What factors do you believe help you win?
Kelvin: Hardwork and peter50216.
Pi-Hsun Shih: Practice and good teammate 😀
Q. CodeChef: What motivates you to compete?
Kelvin: Excellence? That too old? Seriously though thrill, joy, and nothing else.
Pi-Hsun Shih: Because it’s fun.
Q. CodeChef: Where do you see yourself 5 years down the line?
Kelvin: A happy place? (Not the happy place Momma used to speak of when we’re little)
Pi-Hsun Shih: No idea.
That, ladies & gentlemen is Team ench_mango to you. We thoroughly enjoyed their responses and hope you did too.
We will be back soon, so keep watching this space.
Regards,
Rudreshwar,
Team CodeChef
