Hello Codeforces community,

I am happy to announce that Rocket Fuel Inc. will soon be hosting a contest called Rockethon on Codeforces. The contest is prepared by Rocket Fuel employees Jon Derryberry, Alexander Ruff and me, Eldar Bogdanov. We hope you will have as much fun solving the problems as we had crafting them. The contest will feature prizes and T-shirts for top performers. Also, Rocket Fuel is interested in hiring the best of you after this event, so let me tell you about the company and why you would want to join us.

About Rocket Fuel

Rocket Fuel is building technology platform to do automatic targeting and optimization of ads across all channels — display, video, mobile and social. Our pitch to advertisers is very simple "If you can measure metrics of success of your campaign, we can optimize". We have run campaigns for many large advertisers. Examples include BMW, Pizza Hut, Brooks Running Shoes and many more!

We buy all our inventory through real time bidding on ad exchanges like Google and Yahoo. Ad exchanges are similar to stock exchanges except the commodity being traded is ad slots on web pages. Our serving systems currently process 40B requests/ day (~6X Google search volume), 600K requests/ second at peak with response time requirement of 100ms. Our data platform has several PBs data that is used for analytics as well as modeling.

Our engineering team is still small (~100) enough for any one person like yourself to make a huge impact. The team represents many top schools in US and outside — Stanford, CMU, MIT, Wisconsin-Madison, IIT (India), Tsinghua (China).

Rocket Fuel has been named #4 on Forbes Most Promising Companies in America List in 2013 and #1 Fastest Growing Company in North America on Deloitte’s 2013 Tech Fast 500. -

My Personal Story

I joined Rocket Fuel after competing in a previous Rocket Fuel programming contest that was similar to Rockethon. Since I joined, I’ve had the opportunity to learn a lot about the industry technologies we use, such as Hive, Hadoop, Hbase, Storm, and Redis, as well as work on production software that processes tens of billions of requests per day.

Another thing I like about working here is the fast development cycle. We can see the immediate impact of our code by testing in production the same day the code is written. For example, I recently profiled our code, identified a suboptimal use of a trie data structure, tested improvements in production, and then was able to see the site-wide benefit of the optimizations within days, since we push new code to production daily.

It has been a great opportunity to learn from experts across a variety of fields, such as distributed systems, software architecture, databases, machine learning, and optimization. The atmosphere within Engineering team is very friendly, and everyone is willing to answer your questions and discuss problems you may have or discuss their work with you. In addition, we take some time to unwind at work. There are always intellectually curious people around to chat about algorithmic puzzles. We play ping pong, soccer and cricket. Also, I think it’s cool that Rocket Fuel values the problem solving and coding skills of programming contest enthusiasts, and invite you to consider joining Rocket Fuel if the above sounds interesting.

Contest Overview

The contest will begin on February 16, 10AM PST.

The contest length is 3 hours.

The testing of each submission will be performed as soon as the submission is received and the verdict will be delivered to the submission author right away.

The problemset will consist of 6 problems, each of them possibly featuring one or two subproblems. Each subproblem will be worth a fixed amount of points. The ties between contestants with the same score will be broken by penalty time which is computed similar to ACM scoring system.

Prizes

Each of top three contestants will be awarded an iPad Air 16GB.

The top 150 performers will receive a Rockethon T-shirt designed specially for this contest.

Results

Congratulations to the top three contestants:

1. tourist — Gennady Korotkevich, Belarus
2. scott_wu — Scott Wu, USA
3. uwi — Uwi Tenpen, Japan

You can find the list of the top-150 here.

Note. This is a combined reconstruction of Rockethon 2014 announcement and result posts which were lost due to March 2 technical failure.