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University of Saskatchewan Programming Contest

October 7, 2009 · Filed under Point2 - Process and People · Tagged ,

U of S Programming ContestMarcos and I attended the University of Saskatchewan Programming Contest where students were competing for prizes and the chance to attend the Regional Programming Contest at the U of S on Oct 30, 2009.

The contest had eight coding problems to solve. To win you just needed to correctly solve the most questions. However, in the event of a tie the team who solved the problems in the shortest amount of time wins. The questions ranged from very simple to extremely difficult. If you are interested in seeing some sample questions (Or would like to test yourself!) you can check the U of S Programming Contest sample page.

Students competing in the contest ranged from novice to advanced, however there was also an opportunity for anyone interested, to form a team and compete for fun! (count us in for next year). The contest is not just about writing code, but more about focusing on problem solving where you prove your solution with a small program. Of course the competitors who are able to solve each problem with small simple applications definitely have an advantage.

While at the programming contest we had the chance to meet the co-ordinator of the programming contest, professor Christopher Dutchyn. He gave us an overview of the contest, how scoring was handled, and walked us through some of the problems teams were attempting to solve. During our discussion, Marcos chanllenged the winners of the U of S contest to a programming contest with Point2 employees.

During our weekly professional development time we plan to put together a team to practice similar problems to the ones solved in the programming contest. We hope to prepare ourselves for a fun challenge. We know the competition will be tough, but we hope to give students a fun practice session before they go on to another competition. We hope to set something up some time over the next few months. If not, then we will enter a team next year and compete for fun.

At the end of the contest there was an awards ceremony where some prizes donated by Point2 were presented to the contest winners. Marcos and I also had an opportunity to tell the students a little bit about Point2. We hope to see many of those students applying for positions offered through the U of S Internship Program for next spring.

After having a chance to spend a day on campus it sure makes me miss my time their as a student. The faculty and staff were great hosts.

by Brian Richardson and Marcos Tarruella

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TeamCity – Using Personal Builds to help improve cycle time

September 3, 2009 · Filed under Point2 - Technical · Tagged ,

So you are working on a large project, many developers committing regularly to the same code base, you run all the unit tests, commit and you break the build. Now everyone on your team is angry (As they should be!). How could this have happened when you ran all of the tests? The reason is that you did not update before running tests locally and committing. The problem is that constantly updating and building can waste a lot of time. Even if you do update, run all tests, then commit, there is still a chance another developer made a commit during that cycle. The solution: Team City Personal Builds.

Personal Builds

The great people at JetBrains have a feature in TeamCity that allows you to use your build server build agents for “Personal Builds”. More great news is that TeamCity plugins that make use of this interesting TeamCity feature are available for IDEs such as IntelliJ and Visual Studio.

So now when you use your IDE tool with the TeamCity plugin you would use the “Remote Run” option to make your commit. TeamCity will then spin up a personal build, apply your code changes to a fresh checkout of the repository, build, and run all unit tests. If your “Personal Build” passes, your code changes will be committed. Now, here is the great part, if it fails, your code changes will NOT be committed, and you will be notified of the failure.

This feature of TeamCity allows developers to get out of the update, run all tests, and commit cycle and offload some of that work to their TeamCity server.

IntelliJ Plugin Setup

  • File->Settings->Plugins
  • Click on the “Available” tab
  • In the search box enter “TeamCity” (The option JetBrians TeamCity Plugin should show up in the list)
  • Right click on the plugin and select “Download and install”
  • You should see a TeamCity option on your IntelliJ toolbar
  • Enter your TeamCity credentials, setup your notifications

So now, when you commit use TeamCity – > Remote Run rather than using the Version Control menu. You will be notified if your commit is accepted or rejected.

Visual Studio Plugin Setup

To download the Plugin, login to your TeamCity server, go to the “My Settings & Tools” page. You will find a download link for the plugin in the “TeamCity Tools” panel on the righthand side of the page.

by Brian Richardson

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