Hi, I'm Dwayne Towell and I made FastCode.Rocks to give back to the programming community. FastCode.Rocks is a collection of programming challenges for programmers of all skill levels. We hope to offer unique opportunities for programmers who want to improve their skills or compete with others in novel ways.
As a teachering professor of Computer Science, my students need practice in traditional programming contests, such as the International Collegiate Programming Contest. These contests are timed and require source code solutions to be submitted. Judges use hidden data to verify the accuracy of contestant submissions. Winners are determined by the number of accepted solutions, and then by elapsed time. If you are interested in participating in these events email admin@fastcode.rocks.
As the popularity of programming challenges grows, new formats have been developed, but the emphasis has remained constant. For example CodeChef uses a browser-based IDE and supports dozens of languages, leveling and expanding the playing field. Going a step further, Advent of Code allows programmers to work in any language and environment, by only submitting results for verification. Unfortunately, even new contests continue to emphasize rapid development; ranking is by first-to-finish. FastCode contests offer a new goal--code performance. We believe there is place for faster code, even if it takes a bit longer to craft.
A FastCode challenge measures the time to compute and return a correct answer, not the time to create the solution. Contestants retrieve a unique data set, compute the requested answer, and submit their results, all via a web API. Ranking is based on a rolling average of elapsed time, from retrieval to submission, of previously unseen datasets. Contestant may periodically request additional "competition" datasets for each problem, but example data, with expected results, are always available, to verify the accuracy of a solution before attempting a "competition run".
Check out FastCode Challenges for more details.