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You gotta be in it to win it: The Register presents its official Programming Competition

One week to cut your code and claim the crown

Competition Calling all you programmers out there! We have a simple challenge for you – and if you win, you bag yourself a rather smart Smart TV. Read on to find out how you can get involved...

  • Sign up for a trial account with IBM Bluemix. Actually do this now!
  • Check out the competition questions here.
  • Implement and publish your three solutions using the Bluemix environment (the guidelines tell you how to present the user interface and such like).
  • The competition prize is a Panasonic Viera TX-55CX680B LED 4K Ultra HD Smart TV, 55", and the competition will be closed 20th August.

This is your chance to show everyone that you write better code than they do; that you know how to design efficient algorithms; that unlike half of the rest of the planet, you actually test your code so it stands a chance of working as designed; that you can put together a program that can run within a time limit or on limited resources, rather than just lashing together a hideous brute-force monstrosity. And that you can actually read the question in the first place (a useful start, but one that's often forgotten).

The format of the competition is simple: there are three problems to solve, and all you need to do is design and implement solutions to those three questions and submit them to us for marking. It's not about producing funky GUIs or whizz-bang graphics: it's about writing efficient code that satisfies the requirement – and if a lot of people produce correct answers, we're looking for code that satisfies them more efficiently than the rest.

The great thing is that you don't need to spend hours digging up a compiler and a development environment to work on: for this competition you'll use IBM's Bluemix cloud development platform, which lets you get going quickly with one of a wide range of languages.

Why would I want to do development in the cloud?

One of the primary benefits of the cloud is that it enables you to get started very quickly with the actual job in hand. In an infrastructure world the difference between building (say) an on-premise database server and doing the same thing in the cloud is measured in days: you don't have to build the kit, you just fire up some VMs and a virtual network and you're off.

In a development world, getting your software environment – and the associated database server, Web server and such like – similarly takes an order of magnitude longer than simply firing up a new app in something like Bluemix. Cloud development environments let you concentrate on the important part of software development: the actual development of the software.

Funds you're not spending on support staff, servers and IDEs can be spent instead on a better architect, or a database optimisation specialist, or any other of a variety of professionals who can actually make your software more efficient.

Iinto the bargain, you also get the opportunity to try out different development environments and languages without spending interminable hours installing IDE after IDE and chanting weird incantations in an (often vain) attempt to get them to compile “Hello World”.

Doing it on a cloud-based development setup gives you more time to concentrate on the thing that matters: designing your software so it's efficient and effective. If I'm being honest, I dislike hearing software development referred to as “coding”: to me the “coding” aspect – actually bashing the code in and debugging it – is relatively straightforward compared with the design function that should precede it.

Modern computer hardware is so fast and extensible that it lets us get away with writing code with minimal forethought and maximum lash-it-together inefficiency. So we sit and bash away until something works with our hundred-item test data set, and let some other idiot worry about how it performs three years later when the production dataset hits ten million entities.

If cloud-based development lets us employ developers instead of support staff, try out different languages and environments without spending time and money installing them on our machines, and go from no code to a working app in less time than before, it's daft not to give it a go.

Click here for everything you need to know to get started...

Although the competition is only open to UK residents, anyone is able to register for the free 30 day Bluemix trial - give it a go and start building your apps your way, now!

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