Bigger and Better: TCO19 China Regional Event

With the breath of midsummer, the TCO19 China regional event came to Beijing as scheduled. This was the 4th TCO regional event we hosted in China. My first impression when I came to the venue was - wow, how much bigger and better the event is. A larger stage, more participants, greater snacks, beverages and gifts, more enthusiasm - everything was improved over last year, it even made me feel like I was coming into a TCO final.

The great TCO 19 China Event Venue

Delicious food and beverage. Yummy

This year, we had more than 200 outstanding algorithm coders and 15 development competitors gathered in one location for the great onsite competitions. The competitors in the algorithm track were chasing the 10 slots of the exclusive TCO online wildcard round to open the door for a TCO finals ticket!

We prepared attractive registration goodies for all members. Each member got an NFC MI Band 3, an exclusive Topcoder T-shirt and a Nowcoder T-shirt.

The goodies!

By 10:00 AM, a few members had already arrived at our registration desk, even though we officially opened the registration at 11:30 AM. See how enthusiastic they were! (Maybe for grabbing their goodie bags and food, lol.)

Members were grabbing food

Without our two sponsors Xiaomi and Nowcoder, we wouldn’t have had such an exciting venue, food and goodies. Big thanks to you both!

At 1:00 PM, the event was officially started. Harshit came to the stage and talked about what TCO is, what our new vision is, and how we were looking for Evangelists, Algorithm problem and editorial writers. winterflame and I also promoted QA and Development evangelism respectively, to motivate these talented people to participate in our QA/Development track.

Harshit was introducing TCO

I was promoting the Development Evangelism

winterflame was promoting the QA Evangelism

Harshit and I

The session was followed by the CEO of Nowcoder, Xiangyu Ye. He talked about the Algorithm competitions on the Nowcoder platform and how they help members get good jobs.

Xiangyu Ye, the CEO of Nowcoder

Next, the Lead of the Technical Committee of Xiaomi, Baoqiu Cui, and the Lead of MIUI, Weixing Li, gave interesting presentations about the open source culture of Xiaomi.

Baoqiu Cui, the Lead of the Technical Committee of Xiaomi

Weixing Li, the Lead of MIUI

An interesting fact: the Lead of MIUI, Weixing Li, was also an SRM competitor in Topcoder.

Finally, Harshit came to the stage again and introduced the rules and prizes for the upcoming SRM and Development competitions.

At 2:00 PM, our Development onsite challenge and a warmup algorithm competition organized by Nowcoder were officially launched together. The venue turned silent and everybody came back to their machines to start competing.

The warmup algorithm competition only lasted 10 minutes, we had the top 15 members who aced the competition. Each member was awarded a Xiaomi AI smart alarm clock.

The winners of the Nowcoder warmup algorithm competition

In the meantime, our development competitors kept on coding. They were required to finish an SRM historical data analysis app in 3 hours.

Our development competitors are competing for the onsite development challenge (Ignore me, I was just pretending as the development competitor here, I was the copilot ?)

At 3:00 PM, the exciting onsite SRM round was officially launched. This year we set 4 problems in the SRM, while conventionally the number was 3. All competitors needed to solve the problems in 1 hour and 15 minutes. Sounds tough? But these talents are always surprising us! After just a short while, our great members, xudyh, ACRush, and some reds and yellows quickly solved the first three problems at an incredible speed and the leaderboard kept on fluctuating. Later we saw that  more than 15 members had completed the difficult fourth problem!

Harshit was helping an SRM competitor to set up the arena

SRM competitors are competing

ACRush

Junzhao Yang, it’s said that he is still a high school student and this was his third year to attend TCO China event!

By 5:30 PM, both the SRM and the development challenges were over. It was time to showcase the final results!

The winner of the development challenge was jiangliwu, he created a fantastic Angular app in a short 3 hours. His app demonstrated a leaderboard of the whole group of SRM competitors in the past few years, as well as the profile page for each competitor. Here are some screenshots of his app.

The showcase of the winning submission of the development challenge

jiangliwu, the winner of the development challenge

The runner-up of the development challenge was tuxing. He built a robust API service for retrieving the useful info from the given SRM data.

tuxing, the runner-up of the development challenge

Then it was the time to show the result of SRM. This moment was amazing because we could hear the oohs and aaahs on the System Test Fail of Codes.

4th – 10th placement winners were awarded a Xiaomi Sweeping Robot.

4th – 10th placement winners of SRM

Junzhao Yang, the legendary high school student, won third place. He was awarded a trophy and a Millet electric scooter.

Junzhao Yang, the third placement winner of SRM

Mengge Jin won second place. He was awarded a trophy and a Mi TV, 55’’.

Mengge Jin, the second placement winner of SRM

xudyh, Yuhao Du, the TCO17 final Algorithm champion, won this championship with glory in the TCO19 regional China event again! He was awarded a trophy and a Xiaomi Mi 9 smartphone.

xudyh, Yuhao Du, the winner of SRM

The top 10 qualified for the wildcard round. They will fight with the winners from other regionals to get the ticket to TCO19 finals!

The big photo of all members

Good times always go fast. The amazing TCO China regional event was ended. But the fun and exciting day is always memorable! Thanks to everybody who attended and helped create this event. Thanks to Topcoder for giving me such a good Beijing journey again. Let’s meet again next year!