Bashaway is a one of a kind of a competition, organized by the SLIIT FOSS community. This is the fourth year that we see this competition. As the name suggests, the competition mainly evolves around Bash, Linux and mostly automation. You get tasks of different difficulties and would get points according to the difficulty. Competitors can join as teams of 1-4 members. There are two round, one of which is the qualifier, and the next is the final - with all the top 10 teams from the qualifier.
My journey in Bashaway
I registered my team name "devlua". I was the only fighter on that team - I really had the confidence that I could win all by myself. Unfortunately, I got knocked out in the qualifier after placing 22nd in the qualifier standings... which is not really cool. But there are still a lot of good things we can have from the qualifier weekend - so that's nice at least.
I'm still really proud anyway. Managed to score 800 points, which should give the outright first place last year, by a big margin as well. I guess everybody is just too good this year. The competition was tight till the end. I was consistently on the top 10 and was in top 3 many times aswell during the competition - that is something to be proud about I believe.
The competition was too intense. I guess I misjudged my competition. Honestly thought scoring 400 points will guarantee me a place in the final. And I made strategy according to that. You can see an in-detailed strategy plan here. You can also see my entire journey from day 1 to the qualifier in this repository! The teams were insanely fast, it was so hard to keep up with them. I noticed many teams could come up with solutions the moment there was a new task. Definitely was tough to challenge that speed but I still managed to stay with the leaders all the time without dropping too much. I think I still had a good enough speed to stay alive until the end of the round. But it was really exhausting. There was no breathing room for me. If I took a little break then I'll probably be overtaken by atleast 30 teams - which is crazy. I had to fight until the very end without stopping. To do this all alone really took a lot out of me. I'd say I gave everything to keep up to the point I was sick and trembling. Probably one of the best performances I've ever done.
The competition format was a bit different than I initially assumed. Did I really like that format? No - but everybody was in the same boat and it's all about adapting on the fly. I could say some teams didn't really like the format either, and saw some of the early leaders backing up because they couldn't keep up with this format. For me it was fighting till the end no matter what kind of curveball is being thrown at me.
The last 30 minutes of the qualifier
The organizers has announced 2 phases of leaderboard locking to ensure fair play among the teams. During this time no new challenges appeared. Which means slower teams could catch up to the leaders really quickly. I was around top 10-12 at this point. I knew a few more quick challenges would solidify my place in the finals. Unfortunately, the last batch of tasks came a little bit late. Which means most of the slower teams have already caught up to the leaders. Around 20 teams had the maximum points achievable at that point of the competition - which as you can say is really tight. This put a lot of pressure on the leaders. This is also a good opportunity for the slower teams to make a move. Someone could argue that this is unfair for the leaders. But this is the part of the competition. I believe the leaders should be consistent enough if they want to win. It's about who can withstand the pressure. This is something I liked (and hated at that moment) about this competition.
The final batch of questions were released with around 5 or maybe 10 minutes left on the clock. This was a do or die situation for most of the teams. If you are fast then you are safe otherwise your position is in danger. I had a little unlucky moment there. I could only see one easy question (which only gives a little amount of points). At this point I had around 800 points and the difference between me and the leader was only about 25 points. But since I was a little slow with the task I was around 12-13 after that easy task. If I want to get back in to top 10, I had to take a big risk. There were 2 hard challenges and 1 medium if I recall correctly. I could do nothing but select a random hard task and do whatever I have to do to get it done. The clock was ticking away, and I was under so much pressure here. I always perform way better under pressure so I was confident that I could finish the challenge no matter what it asked me to do. And I managed to get it done. Unfortunately, I was 1 minute over the clock when I finished it... shutting down all the possibilities. If I had it done before time, I would get 875 points which would give me a place in the top 10 in the leaderboard as it stands now. But I don't like if's and but's - I simply didn't get it done. It's like this famous quote from some driver
If my mom had balls, she would be my dad
So that ended all the winning hopes for me. Definitely not happy about that, but I still performed very well. There's simply nothing I would've done differently. The preparation was on point, my speed was great. The guys did very well and they probably deserve the final spots. So well done to them and good luck in the finals, I hope the best team wins!
Closing thoughts
Overall great competition, all the teams pushed me to my limits. I can only be proud of myself because I did twice more than I initially planned. There was not a single task I skipped. I didn't know much of bash scripting when I was registering. I didn't know how to do loops or conditionals. It was hard to understand bash - it's just weird! But I know myself very well, and what I can do when I want something bad; so I took on the challenge. I can confidently say that I challenged for the podium. Wasn't lucky enough that day. It happens. With only 2 weeks of training I went from an absolute bash + shell noob to somewhat less noob. That is all great you know, and I can definitely be proud!