The school curriculum is enough for you. Write an application for organizing legal meetings. persons with bank representatives
About the Olympiads
It's no secret that our Olympic movement is well developed.
At computer science Olympiads, you have to solve various algorithmic problems in a few hours. To become a winner of any Olympiad and get the coveted 100 points for the Unified State Exam in computer science or admission to the desired university, you need to work a lot: read books, take courses, solve codeforces, and so on.
Sometimes hackathons are held for schoolchildren, where in a day or two or three… they need to write something similar to a real product. However, this does not provide any bonuses for admission, and therefore there is no special motivation to participate.
Personally, reading Cormen never aroused much sympathy for me, nor did solving spherical problems. And now, to my happiness, this year the PROD Olympiad appeared, which is held in a format close to hackathons.
Briefly about PROD
Prize-winners receive a discount (up to 90%) on new direction FCS HSE and discount (up to 100%) in Central University
Conducted in three stages: two distance qualifiers, the personal round of the finals – remotely, the team round – in person (half of the final points for the individual, half for the team)
Maximum practice-oriented – you don’t need to bot anything, you just need to be able to use the Internet
Three directions: backend, frontend, mobile development
Now about how this Olympics took place
First qualifying stage
There were 3879 participants
Was common to all directions. Pretended to be test of 26 questions on basic knowledge of programming (with a focus on the web) and two simple problems. You could pass it successfully if you knew how to use Google correctly.
Second qualifying stage
1740 people attended it
Practice has already begun here. Participants were given repositories on Github. In a week, backenders had to write a REST API, frontenders had to create a resume builder, mobile workers had to write functionality for a 'started' application. Our repositories contained a description of the functionality that needed to be implemented. In addition to the description, the backenders had the OpenAPI specification, and the mobile developers and frontenders had screenshots.
Solutions were checked automatically. There were sets of 'public' tests in the repositories so that we could have some idea of what scores we might already score on the private tests.
Final stage: personal tour
About 200 people took part in the final
Again repositories, again description of functionality. But the solutions were already checked manually. Therefore, there were almost no strict frameworks: do as you see fit. Duration – 10 days.
The backenders' task was to write a telegram bot for travel planning I apologize in advance for the screenshots:
More details
Front-end developers have a tracker of useful habits:
More details
Mobile phone users have an application to shape their leisure time:
More details
Final stage: team round
It was held at the Ognikovo park hotel (located next to Istra). We were taken there by buses from Moscow.
Participants were assigned in advance (those who did not find a team were assigned automatically) into teams of three to five people. There were 5 cases to choose from:
Matching teammates – application for finding a team for the Olympics
Meeting for legal entities – an application for organizing a meeting between the user and bank representatives
Take care while playing – something like quizlet
SMM platform – a platform for delayed posting of messages with an editor for working on the post
Swipe CSAT – service for collecting feedback about a product or service
We had to choose in an hour. And after another 3 days it was necessary to present the project in front of 25 jury. After selecting a case, the team met with the product manager to discuss the details of the project in more detail.
Each team had two mentors who monitored the development process and gave some advice.
We were provided with a coworking space where we could sit from 9 am to 10 pm. It differed favorably from the hotel rooms in that they brought all sorts of goodies there.
Coworking space and room
On the last day, we had to present the product in 5 minutes, and answer questions in another 5 minutes. Of course, the jury had devices with our application or website in their hands.
Criteria
1. Presentation of the project – 20%, this is how the project was presented, whether the narrative is logical, visual presentation
1. Presentation structure
2. Clarity
3. Visual
2. UI/UX – 15%, is it clear how to use the product features, is its design user-friendly
1. Transparency of user scripts
2. Visual design of the product
3. Functionality – 35%, the main criterion that evaluates how the application works, what has been implemented and at what level
1. Performance
2. Scope of functionality
3. Compliance with basic requirements
4. Additional functionality of the solution
4. Innovativeness – 15%, innovative approaches to solving a problem, uniqueness of the solution
5. Business value – 15%, whether the product solves the pain of the target audience
1. To what extent does the solution solve the problem?
2. How applicable is the solution in practice?
Bottom line
The Olympics website says:
The school curriculum is enough for you. If you like to write code in your free time, this will be an advantage.
This is not entirely true – it is not necessary to know the school curriculum. Before PROD I had no experience in web development sockets don't seem to count. I have never used FastAPI, ORMs, Postgres, aiogram, Docker, Prometheus, etc. However, this did not become an obstacle to successful participation. All the necessary technologies in the required volume can be easily mastered on the fly – the main thing is that there is a desire. This is the beauty of the Olympics: if you Do you like to write code in your free time?then you have every chance of winning.
Participation in PROD gives the guys a good idea of what working in IT (and especially working in a team) looks like. This is very cool! For example, once again typing git commit -m 'bugfix again' at 3 a.m., I asked myself: “Do I like working as a programmer?”
There's a lot I haven't talked about; If you have anything to ask, please comment
