August 20, 2019 Konichiwa Community! The TCO19 Japan Regional Event Rises Up

Time flies so fast and before knowing it, the TCO19 Regional Japan event was already here. Attending the event was a special thing for me because it was my first TCO regional event and because the location was Japan – a country I always dreamed of visiting due to the unique culture and civilization.

The event took place in Tokyo on August 3, 2019, and was much anticipated by our Algorithm community as well as some of our MVP members who attended to help with it: PereViki, yoki, gh3ablo, hi4sandy, thomaskranitsas. iamtong also joined the gang and, of course, adroc and hmehta were there too. This was the second time the event was held in Japan, the first time being in 2015.  

The majority of us arrived in Tokyo a few days before the event.  It is always a lovely feeling to see your fellow Topcoder family and friends live after working day to day together but only meeting one time (or less) per year. That’s the reason we wanted to spend some time together and what better place to go then….Tokyo DisneySea?

It was hot and humid that day, but we had a thrill going through the rides. Topcoder Friends.

The big day came: the event was hosted at GranTokyo South Tower, the amazing office of our sponsor, Recruit Communication Co. Ltd. Without them we couldn’t have held such an amazing event, so big thanks! hmehta together with adroc and the TC3 team (Tatsuro, Sudo and everyone else)  were the ones that drove the event. Next to them were thomaskranitsas and hi4sandy  led the development competition. I was the copilot for the design competition driven by adroc, iamtong was our professional photographer and PereViki, yoki and gh3ablo offered all their support to the members and helped with registration.  The entire team worked their best to serve the community and solve any issues the attendees faced.

We prepared attractive goodies for our members, who started to arrive by 10:30.

The event kicked off with an introduction by Harshit Mehta and Adam Morehead who welcomed everyone, talking about what Topcoder means and how important the community is.  Next it was time for our sponsor’s session, Recruit Communication.


hmehta introduction
adroc introduction
Member listening the intro by adroc

At 11:15,  tomerun , one of the best Marathon Match veterans, talked about his career at Topcoder, about track differences between Algorithm and Marathon Matches, and explained how he approaches the MM problems.

tomerun explaining the difference between Algorithm and MM tracks
Example of a Marathon Match Problem

Then it was the time for the Design and Development competition to kick off. For the development challenge, which was led by thomaskranitsas and hi4sandy, we provided a data set with data from all SRM problems since 2001 as well as member statistics. The members who registered had to analyze the provided data and come up with innovative ideas on how to use that data and create a useful app (web/mobile/CLI etc) to showcase the interesting information that could be extracted.

We had 23 registered members who competed on the challenge and 6 of them managed to create and submit a solution. The champion was kotamanegi who created a CLI application that analyzed the data and suggested SRM problems based on the category and difficulty level that the user has entered as input. The runner-up was rio_issy.

The design competition consisted of 2 fast rounds: the first one was easier – a 1 hour RUX challenge, the scope of which was to design a simple profile page for your favorite character. We received 6 submissions  all from algorithm competitors who were trying their hands for the first time at design – hats off to them! The champion was VTR followed up by jki14

The second challenge was about redesigning the Topcoder Algorithm Homepage in only 2 hours. The MVPs were allowed to participate as well and the champion was PereViki, followed by gh3ablo and yoki .
The Algorithm competition included a warm up round as well as the main competition. The warm up round was basically a 10 min round with 1 problem to warm up members before the main round. It was a simple problem with cases that were not so tricky. The Algorithm Round had three problems. square1001 submitted first and was on top of the leaderboard for most of the time. Later toward the end we had rickytheta and snuke right at the top. System testing and the final revealing of the results were amazing, as at the end we had rickytheta at the top and snuke in 2nd place. However, during the end ricky’s hard failed and snuke moved up to the top with no fails. Thus TCO19 Japan Regionals Algorithm Champion was snuke followed by square1001 taking the runner up spot.

Algorithm Rounds Leaderboard
Members competing

Congratulations to all our winners for handling such tough challenges in this short amount of time!

Thanks to everyone who made the event possible: the TC3 team, MVPs, Recruitment Communication sponsors, and most especially to Harshit, for all the hard work he put into the event, from finding a venue, printing the materials, transporting goodies from India, to reaching out to members to see how to improve the platform, and thanking them at the end of the event. His passion for community can hardly be equaled.

If Jessie is the queen of TCO main event, then Harshit is for sure the king of TCO regionals events.

The event turned out great and it went by so fast.

Group Photo
Team photo

We ended the day with a dinner at a traditional Japanese restaurant to spend some more quality time before we all had to go in different directions.

Dinner Time

Some of us extended our stay in Tokyo, impressed by the unique culture, the civilization, and respect of the people, punctuality and advanced technology. Tokyo is a city of contrasts that mixes the traditional and ultramodern, with very kind people and exciting places It is definitely a must see in a lifetime. 

Thanks to Topcoder for such a unique opportunity to meet dear friends and know other awesome people on that side of the world. Always grateful!

Check our TC Flickr album to see official photos from the event!


DaraK

Guest Blogger



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