Crio Launch Code Blitz: Experience

Crio Launch (crio.do/launch) is a 10-week program where the student has to complete 3 projects (or Micro-Experiences as they call it) that try to provide work-like experience for the participants.

Code Blitz (and QPrep) is a part of the program that goes on alongside QMoney Micro-Experience. Code Blitz goes on one of the weekends during QMoney.

The Aim and The Strategy

This program aims to teach a Problem Solving Technique that helps the students in tackling the questions they face during an Interview or in a Screening Test. The structure of the Program is made so that the students can experience and practice the approach thoroughly and evaluate for themselves if the approach is better than what they generally employ.

During the program, students are first told about the approach and how to go through it. Then, they are asked to solve a few problems to try out the approach. After a little while, there is a Debrief call where everyone is asked about their experience and doubts. During this call, some code samples are also reviewed, to identify a few general approach & code quality flaws and mistakes.

The Course

The program starts with a Kick-off call on a Saturday morning, where all the details about the program are shared. A detailed description and analysis of the recommended approach are shared during this call. Once the call is over the participants are told to start with solving problems under QPrep ME.

After just a few hours there is another call where it is demonstrated how the approach would have worked on the first question to make it clear for the participants and enable them to be able to complete the problems efficiently. Also, a few doubts are taken up after the demonstration.

Then the students are left to attempt the problems. The students are allowed and encouraged to interact on the forum to help each other through the problems.

To end the day, a Debrief session is held. During this session, a few code examples are taken up to signify the importance of thinking through the approach before getting into the problem. Then a few code examples for the first five problems are taken up to identify the pros and cons of each problem and what are the best ways to ensure good code quality and to maintain the best chances of solving the problem. They also emphasize on keeping the code modular to make it easier to debug when the code doesn’t work.

Then the students are told to try to complete all the problems by the Sunday night when a session is conducted to compile up the learnings of the weekend and all the doubts are taken.

My Experience

I used to hate Competitive Coding problems before this program which is why I was quite reluctant to start with this program in the beginning. But this changed quickly, as the way the program is structured is quite good and helps in boosting your confidence through the roof.

The program is set up in such a way that the initial problems are a bit easier to grab your interest and make you confident. Slowly the questions start to get a little tougher which pose a challenge, that makes it far more interesting. After a few problems, you are faced with a difficult problem which you realize is a logical extension of the problems that you’ve just solved, which makes you understand completely why they were emphasising on their approach.

According to me, the program isn’t actually about all the ten problems that are given to you, rather the program is about those 2–3 complex problems that are just an extension of several easy ones.

The program was a great experience and helped me understand how to approach and stand face to face with complex problems and solve them efficiently.