What a year! A lot has happened. It has been exciting from the start to the end. As most of you are probably enjoying well deserved vacations with your family, I wanted to take the time to review some key events for CodinGame in 2016 and do a “Best of.” If you have followed us from the beginning, this will be the opportunity to share good memories. If you have joined us along the way, welcome; we hope that you’re enjoying the journey as much as we do!
Code with the Force
The year took off to a flying start with Coders Strike Back, a contest of bot programming. Jeff06 dominated the competition with the use of a genetic algorithm.
Genetic Algorithms in Coders Strike Back Game
CSB, as we like to call it, was the first game to be released with leagues. It now serves as a tutorial to bot programming games and has become quite a “classic,” receiving praise from many sources:
“True to its essence, Coders Strike Back has delivered its promises”
The Mos Eisley Times
“Piloting a podracer has never been more fun”
Rogue One Today
“Hooked! Once you’re in, it’s hard to even think about playing something else”
The MadKnight Post
A Necessary Reform
After long weeks of hard work, we finally released a new version of the platform around June. It included a simplified home page, a brand new chat, and a rework of the coding points system.
It has been harsh for some of you. It’s never easy to change. It’s even more difficult when you tell your users they’ll lose coding points. At least, you could complain on the new chat. The new system is not perfect but we feel it’s better this way.
The Hug
Internet is beautiful, so people say. We brutally experienced it on a so-far peaceful day of September. Reddit, and more specifically, the subreddit “/r/InternetIsBeautiful” had given us a hug of death.
How CodinGame Survived a Reddit Hug of Death
Technically speaking, the platform went down for a couple of hours, but we managed to get back up quickly, so we survived! Overall it was a rewarding experience. We learned a lot, and we’re still working on our infrastructures to prevent it from happening again.
Hollywood
This was truly exciting. We have worked with Warner Bros! We built an optimization game for the release of the movie, The Accountant. The project schedule was tight but we managed to do it and we’re quite proud of the result. The game was fun!
How to Master the Accountant Hackathon: the Best Strategies
We actually built the game without knowing anything about the movie. We waited until November when it got released in France to watch it. The movie was great, we liked it a lot.
Uncle Bob
In mid-November, we finally migrated the blog from Blogger to WordPress. A few weeks later, I wrote a post which has become the most successful post of the blog. I had not anticipated that.
Agile Has Failed. A Peek at the Future of Programming
I had just watched a very interesting video of Uncle Bob Martin about the future of programming. I thought it was worth sharing. The video was so inspiring that I decided to extract the best parts and summarize it.
This was 2016 in a nutshell. And we have big plans for 2017! You can get a glimpse of it if you check out the new tab in the menu…
We can’t tell you how important you are to us. Thank you for being there! Have a happy end of the year.
See you on the other side!