This fall, Exadel shook things up with a brand-new Engineering community and some awesome events, including the Exadel Code Arena. We sat down with Yauheniya Reutskaya, Lead/Senior QA Engineer and one of the organizers, to chat about how this event is shaping Exadel’s engineering culture and what we can expect in the future.
Read on to learn more about Exadel Code Arena!
What is the idea behind Exadel Code Arena?
Exadel hosts a wide variety of activities and competitions that employees enthusiastically participate in. So, we thought it was time to introduce some professional-level challenges. It’s a great opportunity to warm up, see how our colleagues perform, practice writing algorithms and prepare for tech interviews. Plus, it served as an excellent launch for our new algorithmic and coding challenges community.
How extensive was the preparation process for the initial launch of Exadel Code Arena? What were the major challenges and how did you overcome them?
Getting the pilot project off the ground took about 2-3 months. To be honest, it wasn’t as easy as we thought it would be. We ran into some unexpected challenges. But our team did a great job, and we pulled it off. One of the biggest hurdles was choosing a platform. There are tons of platforms out there for interviews, but not many were right for our kind of event.
How many participants did the event attract, and what was the timeline for their preparation?
About 50 people participated. We gave everyone a two-week heads up about the event, but we didn’t announce the platform until right before it started. Our participants blew us away with their coding skills! Like in most coding competitions, we made the problems harder than they needed to be, thinking it would take people more than three hours. But some of our folks finished everything super fast! People from all sorts of departments joined in.
What aspects of the event did you personally find most rewarding or inspiring?
The inspiring part was coming up with cool prizes, swag, and badges. Figuring out what kind of challenges to give, how the event would work, and then looking at the results was really interesting, especially when people were neck and neck. The best part is, we know people really enjoy these kinds of events, so we can definitely do more of them and build a bigger community.
What drove you to take the lead on Exadel Code Arena and the Algorithmic & Coding Challenges Community?
I’ve always been fascinated by the process of building something from scratch, so when this idea became a tangible reality, I was eager to get involved. In the past, I worked at a university and read the course on Fundamentals of Algorithms and Programming. Therefore, this topic was both familiar and enjoyable to me.
Exadel Code Arena has served as an excellent starting point for the Algorithmic & Coding Challenges Community. Both the competitions and the event are designed to provide our team with "brain workouts" to maintain and develop their coding skills and problem-solving abilities and to actively participate in creating these challenges. This community can also serve as a repository of tasks that our employees can use during interviews.
Yauheniya Reutskaya, Lead/Senior QA Engineer, Exadel Poland
-Could you share some of the exciting plans for the future of the Algorithmic & Coding Challenges Community?
I want to start an expert group to collaborate with me in regularly publishing logic/algorithm challenges (including those encountered during project interviews or heard from others) on our community Slack channel. Willing participants can solve these challenges and, if desired, share their solutions in the channel for discussion, feedback on correctness, and potential optimization. I also plan to periodically organize both in-person and online meetups on topics of interest to the community.