SLIIT Bashaway 2022
Ready. Set. Bash!
On the 1st of October 2022, teams from universities around Sri Lanka competed to develop the best automation scripts over a span of 12 hours.
This was the beginning of the challenge driven automation and scripting competition for undergraduates island wide, and the apex of an effort by the Free and Open-Source Community of Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology (SLIIT FOSS) to encourage Free and Open-Source Software enthusiasts at the university level by introducing them to the basics of automation and the languages commonly used to implement it.
Mentoring Sessions
The competition was preceded by a series of virtual mentoring sessions streamed live on the SLIIT FOSS YouTube channel to spread awareness on the topic and began on the 14th of September with an awareness session on the competition and a mentoring session titled ‘Introduction to Automation’ conducted by Mr. Jananath Banuka, a DevOps Systems engineer. The session covered the topics of docker usage and features of automation.
The next session, presented by Mr. Heshan Dharmasena, a Linux DevOps and Cloud Engineer and Red Hat certified architect, dived into how Bash, the Unix shell and command language, can be used in the world of automation. The session took place on 26th of September and concluded with a demonstration implementing what was learnt earlier in this session.
The final mentoring session of the series happened on the 29th of September and explored how the Python programming language could be used in automation. The session was conducted by Mr. Kusal Hettiarachchi, a Software Engineer at Canva, and ended with an interactive quiz round with participants based on questions from the session.
The complete series of mentoring sessions can be watched on the SLIIT FOSS YouTube channel through the links below:
🔗 Mentoring Session 1 | Introduction to Automation
🔗Mentoring Session 2 | Bash for Automation
🔗Mentoring Session 3 | Python for Automation
Competition Day
The competition finally began on the 1st of October at 9.30am with 20 teams participating from 7 universities island wide.
Over the course of the competition, questions were released to competitors periodically, under 4 levels of difficulty varying from ‘Easy’ to ‘Extreme’ and teams and their members were allowed to submit any number of submissions for each question.
The competition took place solely on a custom-built online platform designed and implemented by the development team of the SLIIT FOSS Community and was built to support all competition tasks from question publishing to answer submission and grading. The platform allowed participants to view and submit answers for questions, event organizers to publish questions and grade answers and gave summaries of question and submission statistics.
According to statistics from the platform, submissions equaled up to a total of 91 unique attempts with:
34 attempts on 4 Easy level questions,
32 attempts on 4 Medium level questions,
15 attempts on 4 Hard level questions,
and 10 attempts on 1 Extreme level question.
Awards Ceremony
The event concluded with an awards ceremony to honor the top three highest scoring teams of SLIIT Bashaway 2022, and was held on the 9th of November 2022 at Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology.
Members of the winning teams and guests of honor from the academic staff at Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology were invited to the Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology campus at Malabe to award the 1st and 2nd placed teams from the University of Moratuwa and the 3rd placed team from Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology. The three highest scoring teams were awarded certificates and cash prizes in recognition of their outstanding efforts.
The social media posts officially announcing the top three teams can be viewed via the following links:
🔗 1st placed team announcement
In a world where almost everything revolves around automation, are you the one to ‘SURVIVE’ or ‘THRIVE’? An upcoming generation of technologists answered, “THRIVE”.
