A big part of keeping everything humming at Facebook is making sure everyone occasionally has fun. In addition to the hackathons we hold internally, we also sponsor programming contests to let external programmers to show their stuff. This contest revolves around the theme of how low can you go; typically a complicated program has sophisticated logic to ensure maximum performance. But what if we turned on the time machine and went back to 1980 when every byte counted? How much performance can you pack per byte when every byte counts?
The rules of the contest are simple: Submit a correct solution to the Facebull puzzle within the contest time frame; the six submitters with the lowest sum attachment sizes (in bytes) will win prizes! Submission directions for the puzzle can be found here.
Our prizes this time around are:
- One Grand Prize winner gets: An Amazon Kindle DX, along with a free e-copy of Facebook for Dummies by our very own Carolyn Abrahm and Leah Pearlman. Plus you get a Facebook Puzzles T-shirt, and if you're in the Bay Area, you can visit us for lunch.
- Two Runner-ups each get: A motorized LEGO Star Wars AT-AT walker and a Facebook Puzzles T-shirt.
- Three honorable mentions each get: A Facebook Puzzles T-shirt.
The official contest rules can be found at the Puzzle Master Facebook Page. Looking forward to seeing everyone's submissions!
Jonathan Hsu, Tim Stanke, James Leszczenski, and David Ellis all work on Facebook Puzzles whenever they aren't working on something else.
