Flipkart GRiD Hackathon

Flipkart GRiD is a national-level hackathon that is held every year from the month of July to August. Every year only teams from India participate but this year participants from the US and India formed a team to participate. More details can be found on the official website. Flipkart GRiD is held for both the Software Development domain and Information Security domain which have separate applications.

This year, a total of 1.46 lakh participants and almost 60k+ teams participated in Level 1 — Online Challenge, amongst them, only 1.3k teams qualified for the next round.

Online Challenge -

The online challenge had 30 questions which were core data structures and algorithms questions including —

1. prefix, postfix expression evaluations, or conversion of infix to postfix, prefix.
2. the output of a simple C program including concepts of arrays & pointers or Java programs.
3. core concept questions on C string functions like working on them.
4. edge cases where some algorithms like Sliding Window/Kadane’s algorithm will fail amongst given options
5. Flipkart’s Startup accelerator program & Flipkart’s most significant sale (these questions were a part of Flipkart news and came in almost everyone’s set)
6. concept on switch case statements
7. the time & space complexity of a given code
8. solving recurrence relations by master theorem
9. top/front elements of the stack/queue after respective push pop/enqueue dequeue operations given
10. traversals of BT & BST
11. traversing a linked list how many nodes have values greater than the values of the next node
12. C++ header files concepts — which can be used for what situation
13. basic oops concepts
14. leftmost/rightmost element of max heap/min heap formed from a given set of numbers
15. string operation questions
16. What will the array look like after iteration in given sorting algorithms — Bubble/Insertion, etc?
17. binary equivalent of decimal/hexadecimal nos
18. given a hash function h(x)=n%9 suppose, then find the index of each array element in the hashtable after being passed through the hash function.
19. given an array and applying binary search to it what will be the sequence of middle elements taken each time to search for element x in the array
20. and the time complexity of different sorting techniques?

These are some of the questions I remember from this round. Also, everyone got different sets of questions mostly values changed. Many people who posted questions on social media were disqualified because of the team ID & email ID being shown on each question on the Unstop platform which will in turn be visible in the snap one takes. This led to a fair selection and a reduced number of cheaters.

I couldn't solve a Java output question and couldn’t finish the master theorem question. Other than that I solved the rest with 11 min remaining when I submitted the test.

This test is the main deciding factor as 90% of teams get rejected here, and to ace this round you must be thorough with all DSA concepts. CS Fundaments were barely asked in anyone’s set and Oops was asked less like maybe 1–2 questions in each set.

On 7th July, I received this email stating that our team is moving to the next round.

Out of 3 problem statements of 3 different domains — AR VR, Blockchain, and Data Science teams have to choose one of them for the next rounds. We chose the 3rd one.

Once chosen the teams can start thinking about the idea and how to build it. For the next 10–15 days we brainstormed ideas and rigorously searched resources on how to implement stuff into our project. This year we had to submit the prototype, demo video, and PPT for the next round.

This year the Semi-Finalists were also given a chance to sit for Flipkart’s OA for hiring. I will update details about the OA here soon.