Meet the Michael Jordan of Sport Coding

pacopico writes: Gennady Korotkevich — aka Tourist — has spent a decade ruling the world of sport coding. He dominates TopCoder, Codeforces and just about every tournament sponsored by the likes of Google and Facebook. Bloomberg has profiled Korotkevich's rise through the sport coding ranks and taken a deep look at what makes this sport weirdly wonderful. The big takeaway from the piece seems to be that sport coding has emerged as a way for very young coders to make names for themselves and get top jobs — sometimes by skipping college altogether.

Comments

Interesting subject, lousy article

[microTodd]

I actually RTFA, because this interested me. And its a fascinating subject. I only sorta knew about these, i.e. hackathons, but I didn't realize there where giant, international, money-prize competitions. This, to me, is coding in its rawest, purest form. No business side, no integration, just problem solving in all its pure elegance and source code in all its unhindered, non-process, non-styleguide'd glory. I know I'm a huge geek but its honestly breathtaking.

That being said...this article is horrible. Ashlee Vance, you might be some sort of bestselling darling-of-the-tech-world author, and congrats on your book on Elon Musk or whatever, but I found this writing almost painful to read.

Theyâ(TM)re not the healthiest-looking bunch, with an average weight that appears to be no more than 120 pounds. There's a disturbingly stereotypical assortment of ticks, both verbal and gesticular, as well as bowl haircuts, wan faces, and shabby clothes. Mark Zuckerberg would look like an Adonis in this room.

his hands swing into motion and beat down on the keyboard with the incredible speed of a court stenographer in the most productive part of a meth binge.

I just have to wonder, why are these writers such assholes? I thought we as a tech society were past nerd bashing. Apparently the "mainstream" is still all about jock-like superiority over other people. Yup, these coder competitors are really smart and hard-working, probably more so than you. So you have to bash them? Why?

I'll leave you with one last quote:

His friends explain that he mostly shuns the press after Wired did a story several years ago, which posited the idea that Korotkevich might âoedie a virgin.â

So does anyone know of any good online tech zines that embrace and exalt this culture, instead of trying to find ways to tear people down?

Aren't these really math challenges?

[johannesg]

I've taken part in a few of these (long ago), but the 'coding' was always extremely minimal. Winning came down to being good at math, knowing things like how to find intersections between a circle and a line, for example. It's cool if people know that, but in my experience with practical for-profit coding for the last twenty years, such problems hardly ever come up - and if they do, it is as a very small part of a much larger piece of software.

In my opinion, the skills demonstrates in this type of coding contest have almost no bearing on any kind of coding carreer. By which I do not mean to downplay their obvious mad c0ding skillz, these are some very smart people, but the article suggests these guys would have high value as corporate coders, which I find rather doubtful.