Meet the Team- OneLastRide

[Nihal Singh]

Hello everyone, This is the first post in the series where we introduce you to the teams who took part in ACM ICPC regionals and have them share some insights and experience on competitive coding.

For this post we get to know more about the team "OneLastRide". They were one of the teams who solved all 5 problems in the online preliminary round from IIT Bombay. Here is a brief introduction with them.

Q) Tell us more about the team.

A) This is a fourth year team of CSE undergrads. The members are Kapil Vaidya, Kushal Babel and Yogesh Kumar.

Q) What are the handles of members on various online judges like Codechef, Codeforces?

A) Here are all the profiles on we could find on the internet.

Kushal Babel

https://www.codechef.com/users/babel97kushal

Kapil Vaidya

http://codeforces.com/profile/oflocon123

https://www.hackerrank.com/kavai?hr_r=1

https://www.codechef.com/users/oflocon123

Yogesh Kumar

https://www.hackerearth.com/@yogeshiitbcse

Q) What regional did you participate in this year. Any particular reason for this choice?

A) We participated in Chennai regional. We wanted to explore the city too.

Q) How was the experience of the onsite contest?

A) The contest problems were designed nicely with all types of problems and difficulty level. However, the lodging and specially messing facilities were not at all satisfactory. 1st rank from IITB and 12th overall was the central aspect that made the contest cherishable. Chennai being a beautiful city, added to our positive experience. 

Q) How did you go about practising in team? What strategies did you make for dividing work?

A) We did not practise. (not even in the official practice round). The strategy was simple. One member who was good at implementation would code up the algorithms suggested by the others who were good at algorithms and data structures.

Q) What’s your advice to everyone who aims to excel in competitive?

A) Two ways : 

         1)Practice a lot 

         2) Be good at algorithm design.

Also its important to have a right mix in the team, in terms of implementational skills and algorithm design skills.