Procrastination is Bad

Alright, this was my second event for Devcathlon and things were less scary and confusing. I wasn't completely lost, which felt pretty good because it meant I was making progress.

My event for this week was, "Don't Wait Until the Last Minute". Basically, the event calculates the average number of builds, commits, and development time (devTime) over the entire match. Within the last n days, if any two categories (builds, commits, devTime) exceeds their respective averages by over m percent, then the team will be penalized. The event is meant to discourage procrastination, so there won't be any last minute "rush-to-finish-up" moments.

Although the event specifications indicated to take the averages over the entire match, I opted for something a little different. If we were to continuously take the averages throughout the entire match, then the average may fluctuate if there is a lot of activity within the penalty period, making the policy a little more lenient (see below). To discourage this work around, I only took the average during the non-penalty period.


What I Learned

I feel through this exercise, I learned a bit more on where to look for data retrieval and retrieving different types of SensorData. I initially retrieved all data using DailyProjectDataClient. But after realizing that I need to retrieve data for an extensive period of time, it would take forever to loop through an entire match collecting 24 hours of data at a time. SensorBaseClient allowed me to retrieve data within a time period I specified.

During my earlier encounters, I had trouble retrieving commit data. But after a (long) look through some documentation, I was able to solve it by adding a property field that was missing. On a side note, I probably would have been deducted points for this event. While I did start early, I think I spent more time towards the end.