The 7th edition of the Kotlin Heroes Contest, an online format hackathon, takes place on June 29th. To help you get up to speed, try out the Practice Round which is open from June 22nd.

The contest will last 2 hours 30 minutes and will present a set of problems from simple ones, designed to be solvable by anyone, to hard ones, to make it interesting for seasoned competitive programmers. The top three winners will get prizes of $512, $256, and $128 respectively with gifts such as t-shirts for the top 50, and, according to JetBrains, global tech companies are known to look closely at top performers.

This contest comes from JetBrains, originators of the Kotlin language, in partnership with Codeforces, a competition website with a community of over 600,000 registered users maintained by programmers from ITMO University, in particular Mike Mirzayanov. 

The first edition of Kotlin Heroes was run in May 2019 and at the time JetBrains stated:

While not being specifically designed for competitive programming, [Kotlin] incidentally fits well in this domain, reducing the typical amount boilerplate that a programmer needs to write and read while working with the code almost to the level offered by dynamically-typed scripting languages, while having tooling and performance of a statically-typed language.

Contests in the Kotlin Heroes series follow, slightly modified, IPCP (International Collegiate Programming Contest) rules and the rubric states:  

• The contest will have  6-10 problems of various levels of complexity.
• You are only allowed to use Kotlin to solve these problems.
• Participants are ranked according to the number of correctly solved problems.
• Ties are resolved based on the lowest total penalty time for all problems, which is computed as follows. For each solved problem, a penalty is set to the submission time of that problem (the time since the start of the contest). An extra penalty of 10 minutes is added for each failed submission on solved problems (i.e., if you never solve the problem, you will not be penalized for trying that problem).

Having a practice round, which is open for a week prior to the the contest itself is a good way to discover how it all works and what is expected. To take part you need to register on the Codeforces site, which can be done using an OpenID or Gmail account.

According to Roman Elizarov, ICPC Live Director and Project Lead for Kotlin.

“Programming contests are a great way to test your programming skills and improve them. Whether you are a seasoned competitive programmer or a Kotlin developer who has never participated in a programming contest before, you’ll find these contests useful, entertaining, and thought-provoking. They’re designed to give everyone a chance to win prizes. We hope that you’ll find the Kotlin language fun and enjoyable to use and that you will keep using it in other programming contests”.

If you are not yet ready for participating in a keenly contested competition but want an interactive way to increase your Kotlin skills head to the Kotlin Playground. Here you will find Kotlin Koans, a series of exercises to get you familiar with the Kotlin syntax and some of its idioms. Each exercise is created as a failing unit test, and your job is to make it pass. The same exercises are also also available via JetBrains educational plugin right inside IntelliJ IDEA or Android Studio. 

• Mike James is the author of The Programmer's Guide To Kotlin, 2nd Edition (I/O Press), a book that explains to programmers the advantages that Kotlin offers and what makes it a fun language to learn and use.

More Information

Kotlin Heroes: Episode 7

Kotline Hereos: Practice 7

Kotlin for competitive programming

Kotlin Koans

Kotlin Playground

Related Articles

Kotlin 1.5 - Mature But Still Growing

Kotlin Gains A Foundation and A Portal

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