College Coders Compete to Last Second at 2017 Global CodeCon Finals

Originally posted on techatbloomberg.com.

Top college coders from around the world gathered on January 27th at Bloomberg’s offices in New York City and London for the Global CodeCon Finals. Competitors took their seats, hunched over their laptops and scanned the first of eight programming challenges that would test their coding skills, speed and strategic thinking.

Over the next two hours, 140 students from 45 universities across the U.S., Canada, Europe and the Middle East would speedily type thousands of lines of code in the hopes of emerging victorious.

In the final seconds of the competition, 18-year-old Timothy (Yi Kuan) Li, a freshman at University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, leapt to the top of the leaderboard, taking home the grand prize. Animesh Fatehpuria, a student from Georgia Tech, won second place, while Karolis Kusas, a PhD student from University of Oxford, who finished second in last year’s competition, bagged third spot.

Bloomberg engineer Rangan Prabhakaran created CodeCon in late 2014 as a way to encourage students to improve their coding abilities. Throughout the year, regional competitions are held at leading universities to determine who will represent each school. The finalists then face off in the championship round, solving problems developed by Bloomberg engineers.

To watch highlights of the competition, click here. 

To read the full article, click here.