Tim Roberts, winner of this year's TopCoder Open, gives a lesson

Not in coding, silly billy — that's way above my TechnoDolt™ pay grade.

Rather, it's how he approached his problem that makes him worth mentioning here, and offers instruction to those of us without code codons.

I've always wanted to use that phrase in context and I appear to have finally succeeded.

But I digress.

Ben Worthen, in a May 20, 2008 Wall Street Journal story about Roberts, wrote, "The winner's secret: avoiding bells and whistles, and asking questions until he knew exactly what the judges wanted his software to do."

Here's the WSJ article.

Keeping It Simple Pays Off For Winning Programmer

A tournament for computer programmers crowned a champion Thursday. The winner's secret: avoiding bells and whistles, and asking questions until he knew exactly what the judges wanted his software to do.

We won't pretend that this story is sexy. But it's certainly instructive. The majority of tech projects miss the mark somehow: They're either delivered late or fail to meet expectations, or both. Two of the main reasons for this are poor communication between the information-technology department developing a system and the businesspeople who intend to use it, and an influx of new requirements that cause a project to get derailed.

Tim Roberts, who bested nine other finalists to win the "component design" competition at the TopCoder Open in Las Vegas, made up his mind from the get-go to do everything in his power to avoid these pitfalls. (TopCoder is a software-development company that structures the work it's hired to perform as competitions that freelance computer programmers participate in.)

On the prior Monday at noon, Mr. Roberts and his competitors received their instructions: Design a computer program that can calculate relationships between TopCoder programmers. They were given six hours to complete the task. Mr. Roberts says that he spent the first hour reading through the project's requirements and asking "at least 30 questions" of the person who wrote those requirements.

Once he understood exactly what was required, he set about designing a system that met those requirements — and nothing else. Competitors get extra points for bells and whistles, but Mr. Roberts knew that any time spent designing extra features would come at the expense of more basic functions. Instead, he focused on making sure that his software worked and that he finished by the deadline, which he did — by three minutes.

Mr. Roberts, who designs systems at Axiom Investment Advisors by day and usually participates in competitions after the rest of his family is asleep, found out that he won the $25,000 first prize Thursday afternoon. He says that he planned to celebrate by doing "about four hours of work."

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Or, as Ray Kurzweil remarked in what has to be one of the best four-word advice nuggets ever: "Work smart, not hard."