And we’re live…

Well, here it is, Monday morning. We are unboxing all of our swag and will shortly be over at the RDS setting up our lounge. Follow our progress all day on @TripSummit. In the meantime, once you are settled into your room thinking about all of the cool speakers on the main stage, builder stage (and maybe surfing?) we are going to launch our first challenge to get into TripAdvisor’s exclusive developer lounge.

The entry challenges rely on Codility.com’s awesome coding challenge platform. There is lots of great information on their site (and lots of cool practice exercises). So, if you fly through our first exercise you might want to start playing with some of the harder ones to see where this whole thing is going. Also, if you are hiring engineers great European start-up to checkout and work with (we do)!

First, some quick background, rules for the challenge/contest are below but some quick tips:

1. You can submit as many entries as you want so don’t worry about the time limit. Also, how long you spend doing it doesn’t matter (though time of submission will break ties)
2. To get entry into the lounge you need to score a 100 on the Codility report (will be e-mailed to you a few minutes after you submit). This means it has to compile, pass all their test cases, and run with the specified performance.
3. Before you submit you can add as many test cases as you’d like (do this) and use debug output. One big warning here, REMOVE the debug output before you submit, it will slow down your runtime and may cause you to fail some of the performance tests.
4. You may choose any language supporting by Codility but keep in mind some will do better in the different categories (i.e. don’t do code golf in C++ unless you really think you can pull it off).
5. We will have a list of completions (and a live leaderboard for all of the different categories) in our booth/lounge but feel free to hold onto your completion report to show us if the internet gets spotty.

To kick things off we want to start with a challenge based around a basic game you might play on your plane ride here. This game involves a dice and a randomly scored board (okay, maybe you won’t really play it but hey if you are a developer maybe). The goal is to figure out the maximum score possible on a given board. Full details of the challenge here, have fun:

Task link: https://codility.com/honeypot/TripAdvisor-EYWI-day-1

Leaderboard link: https://codility.com/l/TripAdvisor-EYWI-day-1

Feel free to send us feedback/questions on @TripSummit and stay posted to that and #EYWI throughout the summit for updates.

Launching first challenge at 10:00am IST on Monday

Construction on the Developer’s Lounge is started, our office is filled with SWAG/prizes, and Codility has delivered an amazing setup so the team here is playing with the challenges that we will be rolling out each day of the summit (the last one is TOUGH).

While we plan to launch the 2nd and 3rd challenges at 6pm Irish time the day before each conference day we will be launching the first task at 10:00am IST on Monday to help people with busy travel schedules (or jet lag) get going early on coming up with solutions to the task. Look here (and on all of the social media channels for the link).

Safe travel everyone!

TripAdvisor Developer’s Lounge

We are excited to announce that TripAdvisor is sponsoring the official Developer’s Lounge of the 2014 Web Summit. Hanging around our booth will be a slew of people worth chatting with:

• Andy Gelfond, SVP of Engineering & Operations – the 30th overall employee to join TripAdvisor and current head of all things engineering at TripAdvisor
• Adam Medros, SVP of Product – Another early joiner (2004) and currently responsible for heading worldwide product development for TripAdvisor
• Bernie Bernstein, VP of Engineering, Tripadvisor for Business – Leads the engineering team for our B2B organization
• Don O’Neill, VP of Engineering, Operations & IT – Leads the Site Operations, DevOps, and IT teams worldwide
• Lori Russo, Head of Worldwide Recruiting – Responsible for finding talent across functions and locations for Tripadvisor worldwide
• Lars Holzman, Director of Engineering, TripAdvisor Ireland – Head of the Irish office focussed on finding the world’s best engineers from our newly established Development Hub in Dublin

Cool, so how do you get in and chat with those people (or just drink some of our craft beer)? You might be able to catch some of them hanging out outside the lounge but the real action will be inside the exclusive lounge which will require completion of daily Coding challenges to get in. More details about these challenges will be posted on this site (as well as social media and the Web Summit newsletter) daily. Oh, and by the way, these aren’t trivial challenges we are really looking to challenge the developer community coming out for the Builder’s summit and they will get harder each day.

But wait there’s more… We are also offering prizes for people who complete the challenge across a few different categories:

1. Shortest solution (code golf): The shortest solution that correctly passes all of the test cases. Yes, this means you need to pick the right language and C++ probably isn’t going to win this one.
2. Fastest solution: The wonderful platform put together for us by Codility.com is going to see which solution runs the fastest.
3. Coolest solution: Our engineering staff at here at TripAdvisor Ireland are going to score the passing solutions for “Wow” factor – give us an obfuscated solution, a super clever solution, or one that makes us laugh.
4. Random: Okay, so you will all work hard and have I mentioned these challenges are HARD, so we want to make sure everyone is in on the prizes. Each day we will also select at random two completed tasks to receive prizes.

The prizes by day will be selected by winners (in the lounge) :

Day 1: Bose Headphones or Speakers

Day 2: Bose Headphones, Speakers, or Kindle

Day 3: Kindles or iPad minis

Keep your eyes on this blog, @TripSummit, and @WebSummitHQ for updates on the challenges!