Halite Postmortem

Over 3 months later, it’s finally over. The incessant scrolling of squares across the screen. The late night forays into code to fix an off by one error. The obsessive refreshing after a submission to see how the newest bot does.

The Beginning:

I first heard about Halite from @dexgroves. He casually mentioned it to me on November 28, 2016 at 10:03 AM CST.

https://halite.io

Might be your kind of thing

It was over from there.

Rewind:

Before I begin, let me introduce myself. I’m an actuary working at Allstate Insurance Company. I love puzzles and tinkering with programming really basic stuff on the side. I am not a programmer by trade, but have always been interested in computer programming. I don’t do machine learning at my job (yet), or do any real programming.

I’m also married with a 15 month old who won’t sit still, so my time available as you can imagine was limited. However, I have a very supportive wife who may not understand all my obsessions, at least supports it when she can.

So my expectations going into this was, oh, this seems fun, let’s take a look and see what I can do for a couple of weeks and then move on…