The team is a bit smaller this year, just four of us: Paul (who was also with us last year), Travis, Bryan and me. We had quite a few other people interested, but they all vanished when it came time actually to sign up. That’s a bit unfortunate, I feel, because there’s no limit on team size this year, but shou ga nai, as we say in Japanese.
Material has started to appear on the contest web site, including a FAQ. Little clues have been scattered about, but of course these lead you in no particular direction; generally the meaning of them only comes clear after you know the contest problem.
There are some strong hints that this year’s contest will be of the type where one submits the output of your program, rather than the program itself to be run by the organizers. I’m not as keen on this style myself because I feel it takes away one of the most difficult challenges in programming: handling error conditions. When a developer is running a program himself and it’s not interacting with any other programs, he doesn’t need to worry much about handling errors: if the program crashes, you just tweak it and re-run it. When you program is being run out of your control, however, you can’t afford to so careless with handling errors: you need to try to recover, rather than just die.
We had our setup meeting last night, introduced Paul and Travis to QAM (and fixed several bugs in it!), and got Gitosis set up. I’m very pleased with Gitosis: it’s extremely well designed.
So we’re all set, and are just waiting for the contest to start.