Congratulations to the August Coders and Designers of the month! Check out their interviews.

Algorithm: rockaustin2k6

What is your favorite part of TopCoder?
SRMs are what I have only competed in TopCoder and i like them the most. Just before the arrival of the active contest, thousands of coders group together in TopCoder chat rooms, have fun talking to one another, and then the 1 hour 15 minutes of coding(with live summary of submissions) and finally, the challenge round (which I have never performed well). I find it highly interactive way of gaining knowledge as compared to contests of various Online Judges and others…

What was the hardest project or problem you worked on last month?
I spent last month with few level 3 problems of division 1 related to graphs, level 2 problems of division2 related to Dynamic Programming and some questions of acm uva online judge related to Maths.Division 1 level 3 problems are the hardest and i touched them first that month. I could still remember the problem related to Euler cycles of SRM 144 division 1 hard and my dp solution related to lcm for SRM 160 division 1 hard.

The trickier lcm problem was that given an integer S (S<=52), you needed to decompose it into several integers (>=1) such that sum of them is equal to S and their lcm is maximum. Going with the obvious recursion of single state { f(s) = for all 1<=i<=s max(lcm(i,f(s-i)) }, was giving a wrong answer. This was to be done carefully to avoid wrong answers (they are what I hate most).

What do you think is the most important factor to win a competition at TopCoder?
I think speed with accuracy (getting least debugging and logical errors) and little bit of typing speed matters most.

What is the story behind your handle?
Coding is fun. I find TopCoder very attractive and interactive but came to know about it so late (after high school). What I am now is because of my hard work, contributions of my brother imrankane2005 and seniors (fameoflight,R0N,humblefool)[All TopCoder handles], batch mates, present study conditions of my college(IIIT Allahabad), highly encouraging Sanjeev Sir (faculty member of the college,Assistant Professor) and, of course, my parents.

Tell us one surprising thing about you?
I am the follower of islam yet don’t (can’t) eat meat.

Design: viviz

What is your favorite part of TopCoder?
Competition makes software design more interesting, and you can discuss your solution with all the designers/deveopers from all over the world, you can improve your skills, it’s exciting.

What was the hardest project or problem you worked on last month?
I believe there are no easy competitions. Every competition is hard.

The hardest part of each project is the REQUIREMENT Specification is unclear, we need to talk with Architecture/PM for more details with much more time.

And as a non-native english speaker, it’s hard to writing Component specifiaction and UML documentation without any spelling/grammar errors.That’s why I always got punishment in scorecard 4.1.6

What do you think is the most important factor to win a competition at TopCoder?
You should read each part of RS very carefully, each requirement listed in Logic Requirement should be taken into consideration.

After you get a general solution of your design, you need to consider the corner of each algorithm AND
public API configuration elements. The exception is handling dependency components etc.

Addtionally, make your design very flexible is also important. Then write your detailed documentation. Don’t forget to provide a comprehensible demo in CS for both reviewer/developer to understand the usage of your component: e.g.

If it’s a WCF Service component, you’d better provide a about how to generate client, how to host your service, how to access WCF service via Client. If it’s a windows service component, you’d better provide a demo how to install/uninstall the service. For any Demo part, you should provide sample input and discuss what’s the expected behavior of each Demo action. The one word is

What is the story behind your handle?
vivi is my english name, I use the first character of my family “zhang”, so it’s viviz. No special story^^

Tell us one surprising thing about you.
Seems no special thing makes me surprising…

Development: snow01

What is your favorite part of TopCoder?
Everything, I am involved in =). Prizes, DR Points, DR Ranking, Assembly Competitions.

What was the hardest project or problem you worked on last month?
I think the Cockpit Release 4 assembly. I spent almost 24 hours on one single bugr - just to fix it with 2 lines of code. Obviously the fix required me to read the code of flex sdk.

What do you think is the most important factor to win a competition at TopCoder?
1) Pick a specific area and stick to that - like I picked “cockpit” assemblies. After 1-2 competitions, you would be having edge than anybody else. There are contests which others would finish in 3-4 days and I have taken only 4-6 hours to finish.

2) Reviewer comments are quite important too. Even if your submission is half complete, do the submission - it is going to give some learning for next contest.

What is the story behind your handle?
“snow” is nick name of my beloved.

Tell us one surprising thing about you.
I love watching a lot of movies, lot of sleep and lot of work. Surprisingly it is hard to fit all 3 in a single day, even any 2 too =).

Studio: djackmania

What is your favorite part about Studio?
Being a winner.

What was the hardest project you worked on last month?
Ferguson.com “Professional” iPhone Application, I finished the project “outdoor”.

What do you think is the most important factor to win a competition at Studio?
Passion, passion, passion.. and push to the limit…

What is the story behind your handle?
The fans (mania) of my nickname in the Old Javanese spelling (d+jack)

Tell us one surprising thing about you.
I’m not a graphic or web designer, I’m an electrical engineer