prechelt's blog

Shadowcat lessons learned report

Submitted by prechelt on Thu, 2011-01-27 09:10

The Shadowcat (Perl) team's lead Matt Trout has put together a report by the title of "Plat_Forms redux".

It is consists mostly of Perl-ish technical considerations but also has some interesting methodological and general statements. And it is pretty witty.

Nearing the end: Packaging

Submitted by prechelt on Wed, 2011-01-19 17:29

Still no panic.

90 minutes before the end of the contest, we told the teams to remember that they must finish packaging and ZIPing their solution before 18:00. (The requirement says to send an email containing the checksum of the ZIP file by that time). Several teams promptly finished their development and went into the packaging phase without any signs of wrath, depression, or panic.

Cool, folks!

Impressions 2: Containers and tools

Submitted by prechelt on Wed, 2011-01-19 16:57

I bet that 78% of all readers had the wrong association when they saw the title of this post.

Here come some photos of the participants' containers and tools:

 read more

Impressions 1

Submitted by prechelt on Wed, 2011-01-19 16:39

Better late than never: Here are a few photos from the contest to give those poor non-participants some idea of what it looks like and the tired participants some material for reminiscing with their grandchildren.

Who said software developers don't collaborate?

It is not true.

 read more

Prototypes online

Submitted by prechelt on Wed, 2011-01-19 09:06

In case you wonder, these are the prototype solutions that are currently publicly visible. In alphabetical order (which is the order in which teams have registered for the contest in the past months):

Found on the web

Submitted by prechelt on Wed, 2011-01-19 08:58

Nice: read more

Day 2: Good morning!

Submitted by prechelt on Wed, 2011-01-19 08:16

Ten minutes ago (it is now exactly 8:00), I intended to write something like "The room is filling quickly with the refreshed teams". But not only can we not yet assess the refreshed-ness of the teams, the filling-up part is also not quite true: The official start of the contest's day 2 is here, but only five of the teams are!

It looks like they are not panicked. (As of 8:10, add another four partial teams.) read more

Are there sleepy platforms?

Submitted by prechelt on Tue, 2011-01-18 23:10

Sleep is approaching. More precisely: some of our teams are approaching sleep. Still more precisely, the first team left at 21:50, the second one left at 22:55, still an hour before the official nightbreak.

Now here is a good one: Assume you have 16 teams from four-and-a-half different platforms and the first two teams to leave for the night are both from the same platform. What do you think? Is this a platform characteristic?

And the second question is obviously: Which of our platforms would this be? (Please take a guess.) read more

Yesterday...

Submitted by prechelt on Tue, 2011-01-18 22:43

...all my troubles seemed so far away.

This is what the room looked like yesterday around 14:00 before the teams arrived:

Plat_Forms 2011 contest room on 14:00, Jan 17

and this is what it looked some time today, after the contest had started (photo taken in the exact opposite direction):

Plat_Forms 2011 contests room on day 1

Funny episodes

Submitted by prechelt on Tue, 2011-01-18 19:05

A few strange, singular, or funny events have also happened along the way. For instance: read more

Syndicate content