Folks, as we dive into Event 2, I want to offer some advice based on the comments I saw for Event 1.
- Don't overthink the Beginner event. We're not looking for a script or function - a one-liner, if possible. Don't overdeliver.
- Avoid aliases and positional parameters - this is a practice outlined in the Competitor Guide.
- TEST YOUR CODE. You can't modify it. Also, judges can't see any comment you might leave when "voting" on your own entry, so you can't use comments to mitigate an error. TEST. Submitting an entry is like pushing a script into production.
- If there's a straightforward, native way to do something - do it. People seemed to down-vote a lot of entries in Event 1 for using Robocopy. Not that it's wrong... but the general community opinion seems to be, "use native commands when they exist and can solve the problem."
Remember, these aren't my guidelines - this is what I'm seeing in the comments that I'm reviewing, and wanted to pass them along as a sense of what the community seems to favor and disfavor.
One-liners are great when the command is simple. But concatenating a series of semi-colon delimited strings in a LONG line is not a one-liner — at least in spirit — and it gives bleary-eyed judges a headache.
Couldn’t agree more, June. 🙂 I think most of judges think the same. One pipeline, not one line as Richard pointed out here: http://richardspowershellblog.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/dont-go-mad-on-a-one-liner/