The iHub #5YrCodeJam Challenge

SciCodeJam, wow! Its been surreal. Being part of an awesome team that wants to help everyone become passionate about what they love doing, coding, has been inspirational. Humble beginnings, until we met Angani and boy did we soar. iHub was celebrating five years of success and we offered to make the day interesting. 

Together with Angani and iHub, we initiated a programming contest, the 5yearCodeJam. The contest took 48 hours, during which the contestants were to answer two questions using any programming language of their choice. The contestants were then required to submit their code either through email or their Github accounts together with their answers. We evaluated the code and I gotta say, competition was stiff. Out of 139 sign-ups 23 submitted their responses within the allocated time. We had 5 finalists out of which we got the Queen and King of code. There the finalists were all awarded prizes at iHub's five year party. The prizes were courtesy of Angani .

This is just the beginning, stay tuned for more. 

SCICodeJam Meets Angani Ltd

The Bulbs that got some light:

The coding community bulb: We thought of starting up a common place where we can publish programming challenges that would help university students engage their mind. It all started with a pilot study on The School of Computing and Informatics(SCI)  students where we would post weekly challenges that would see coders with the best algorithms win awards (Cool T-shirts, mugs) as well as the title 'Code Champ'. The coding community came to be on Jan 19th, 2015

The start up bulb: We met with the very awesome Riyaz Bachani, Founder of Angani and he loved our coding community thing and was ready to help us reach even to a larger community. Riyaz became a mentor who really believed in our initiative. He helped us get to The iHub 5 Year Anniversary (Happening on 7th March, 2015) with the help of the James Ndiga where we intend to hold an Amazing Hunt kind of challenge where guys can hunt for treasures based on clues given

Riyaz, opened up our eyes in a way that made our coding comminity initiative be more of a start up and reach out more people.

Angani has been our mother/mentor on this journey to having efficient problem solvers in our society.

The #5yrCodeJam

We met with the very awesome Riyaz Bachani, Founder of Angani and he loved our coding community thing and was ready to help us reach even to a larger community.
Riyaz became a mentor who really believed in our initiative. He helped us get to The iHub 5 Year Anniversary (Happening on 7th March, 2015) with the help of the James Ndiga where we intend to hold an Amazing Hunt kind of challenge where guys can hunt for treasures based on clues given as well as the #5YrCodeJam Challenge. We even got a hit by iHub Kenya, courtesy of Riyaz Bachani(Angani Ltd) via James Ndiga(iHub Kenya)

iHub blog Link
 http://community.ihub.co.ke/blogs/22497/the-5yrcodejam-challenge-celebrating- 5-years-of-writing-code

We thank Angani and iHub for the collaboration we've had.

How We started

Inspiration:

After getting familiar with solving fun mathematical questions on Project Euler, we got so  psyched that it became part of us solving questions on a daily basis. We had this thumb rule, one question a day.

Solving questions helped us get to know the art of problem solving. We added up into our tool box, skills that really were of great significance to us and the community as a whole. Skills that made code that we wrote efficient. When i say efficient, i mean space and time complexity. Ooh yes, you got that right, Big O analysis. Skills such as Memoization especially Modular Exponentiation became part and parcel of us.

Our way of thinking changed completely and shoot, some bulbs did light and SCI CodeJam was born(19th Jan, 2015)