We had our first code war at Windward this Friday, which I am dubbing Windward Code War One! It's a battle to see who can write the best solution to a problem in a relatively short period of time. My team, Nuclear Pony, lost horribly. So let me share my thoughts with you about this, and feel free to give me your own. If you want the code (original and final), hit the link above.
The Challenge
For this challenge, we had to write AIs to play in the strategy board game, Broadside. Basically, you get a set of ships; each one has a certain number of sails, and when it gets hit, you lose a sail. You get hit when a boat moves into the square adjacent to yours with their broadside facing your ship. In addition to that, you also have islands in the water, and surrounding land where you can place a couple of batteries (cannons) that will hit any opponent that passes the square in front of them.
Postmortem Analysis
I thought a lot about why we failed so badly. Our AI's moves were all considered invalid, except for our first two setup-moves; and so aside from the small edge we got from those, we had nothing, and experienced complete devastation. I could say a lot about what happened, but I think it ultimately ties to one simple lesson.
Test Early, Test Often
Basically, we over-spent on planning. We developed a truly fearsome strategy before we even started coding. But this cut out some much needed debugging time which left us with failing software. We should have written some code earlier, so that we could find the hang-ups earlier, and have more time to figure them out. In this case, I'm quite sure we would have hit our major hang-ups right away, and if we did, we would have been able to make a couple minor changes in implementation that would have corrected the invalid moves problem (take a look at the final code if you want to see if you agree with me). Even if our strategy had not been as great as I think it was, we would have been a lot happier to see it performing as we had intended.
In My Element
While I was truly disappointed in my own performance - and quite embarrassed, I admit - I absolutely had a blast! Time flying. Lost in the moment. Hacking with hardly a thought of anything else (leaving me quite thirsty after the event was over). This is my utopia!
I hope you found this insightful and/or inspiring, but in any case, happy coding!
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Adds various capabilities such as inequalities,descending sort, joins, and other functions.
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SQL Select Debugger
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Added a Query tab as a field for typing or pasting in a select statement
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All tags using that Data source will be automatically updated with that name.
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New single interface to replace 2 separate dialog boxes
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Displays of all the tags in the template, structured as they are placed in the template. This provides a simple & intuitive way to see the structure of your template. Also provides the capability to go to any tag and/or see the properties of any tag.
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The ability to integrate the Windward Engine into Google’s cloud computing platform for developing and hosting web applications dubbed Google Applications Engine (GAE).
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This new integration will allow for processing of complex scripts and bi-directional text such as Arabic. Your PDF output will be much tighter and more closely match your template, and we’ll be able to respond rapidly to PDF requests and fixes.
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Includes support for new ForEach and slide break handling, table header row repeat across slide breaks, and native Microsoft support for charts and images.
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Tags are color coded in the template by type, making it easy to visually identify them.
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Version 13’s core code has been reworked and optimized to offer a reduced memory footprint, faster PDF generation and full documentation of supported features and limitations in the specifications for DOCX, XLSX and PPTX.
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Documents can include advanced Word image properties such as shadows, borders, and styles.
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Windward has updated HTML output to reflect changing HTML standards.
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Windward now works with a slew of new datasources: MongoDB, JSON, Cassandra, OData, Salesforce.com
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The Generate Code tool in the designer allows you to open an existing template and, with a click of a button, automatically create a window with the code needed to run your current template with all data sources and variables. Simply copy this code and paste into your application's code in the appropriate place. You now have Windward integrated into your application.
You only need to do this once. You do not do this for each template. Instead, where it has explicit files for the template and output, change that to parameters you pass to this code. Same for the parameters passed to Windward. This example uses explicit values to show you what to substitute in where.
Any pivot tables in an XLSX template are carried over to the XLSX output. The ranges in the pivot ranges are adjusted to match the generated output. So your final XLSX will have pivot tables set as expected in the generated file.
This makes creating an XLSX workbook with pivot tables trivial.
In an imported sub-template, if its properties for a style (ex. Normal) differ from the parent template's properties for the style, the use in the sub-template can be set to either use the properties in the sub-template, or the properties in the parent.
You set to retain when you don't want the child template's styling to change when imported. You set to use the parent when you want the styling of the imported template to match the styling in the parent.
Any explicit styling is always retained. This only impacts styling set by styles.
Tags can be placed in text boxes. Including linked text boxes. This gives you the ability to set the text in a textbox from your data.
Tags can be placed in shapes & smart art. This gives you the ability to set the text in a shape from your data.
When generating HTML output, the engine can either write bitmaps as distinct files the generate HTML references, or it can embed the images in the HTML providing a single file for the output.
You can place tags in pretty much any part of a template, including in footnotes & endnotes.
Any parts of a DOCX or XLSX (PowerPoint does not support this) file that are locked in the template, will be locked the same in the output.
If a font used in the template does not exist on the server generating a report, the font to substitute can be specified.
In addition, if a glyph to be rendered does not exist in the font specified, you can specify the replacement font. This can be set distinctly for European, Bi-Directional, and Far East fonts.
If you need this - it's essential. And if you don't need it, it's irrelevant.
Windward enables you to build a document by applying multiple datasources to the template simultaneously. When Windward is merging the data into a template, it processes the template by handling each tag in order, and each tag pulls from different datasources. (As opposed to processing all of one datasource, then processing the next.)
This allows the select tag to use data from another datasource in its select. For example, if you are pulling customer information from one data source, you can then pull data from the sales datasource using the customer ID of the customer presently processing to pull the sales information for that customer. If you're interested in patching together your data from multiple datasources, read this post on our blog.
