StarTree Mission Impossible: Data Reckoning — A Developer Coding Competition
StarTree Mission Impossible: Data Reckoning is a fun and educational developer challenge focused on solving problem sets around real-time analytics. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to compete with other Agents from around the world in a series of high-stakes coding challenges, each lasting two weeks, all centered on real-time analytics using StarTree Cloud Free Tier, powered by Apache Pinot. From anomaly detection to funnel analysis, every mission will push your skills to the limit. Submit your solutions before time runs out and compete for a chance to win prizes, like an Apple Vision Pro or a ticket to AWS re:Invent. Whether you’re a rookie or a seasoned operative, this is your chance to go undercover in the world of real-time analytics and emerge a hero. Get all the details and accept your mission here:
About the competition
This competition consists of 5 individual missions (problem sets), which can be played independently from each other. Starting with Mission 1 (9/17), each problem set will be played for 2 weeks before the submission closes and the next mission starts. You can only compete in the currently active mission, but you can enter it and submit your solution anytime within its 2 weeks. Want to sign-up the day before the deadline and pull an all-nighter to submit in time? Totally fine!
Mission timeline
The prizes
Everyone who submits a solution to any of the challenges on-time will win a free T-Shirt that we’ve designed for this competition.
In addition to the T-Shirt, every one of the 5 missions will have a grand prize winner. All submissions will be judged based on a standardized criteria around ingestion speed, [TBD], to determine the winner. As the grand prize winner you’ll get to choose one of the following prizes:
- Apple Vision Pro
- Full registration for AWS re:Invent, hosted December 2-6 2024, including a $1400 travel voucher to get you to Las Vegas
- DoorDash gift card worth $3,500!
That’s 5 chances for you to win big!
Support
For each mission, we will provide a set of documentation and supportive content that will be useful for the specific challenge you’re trying to solve. We will have a dedicated channel in the StarTree Slack Community, as well as a bi-weekly office hours with our engineers to ask your toughest questions. Find the mission details below for more info.
How to play
1. Register for your mission briefings. You’ll get an email with detailed information and your API Key needed for the challenge
2. Get a StarTree Cloud free account:
3. Start coding! With your StarTree Cloud Free Tier Account and the details from the email, you’ll be able to immediately start ingesting data and coding queries.
4. Submit your solution! When you’re finished, send an email with a StarTree Cloud access token to mission.impossible@startree.ai; the first mission’s solutions are due by Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 11:59 PM PDT.
5. Stay Tuned for the Winners! Allow the judges 1 week to determine the winner.
Mission 2: Funnel Royale
Agent, clickstream data is once again streaming from an e-commerce website into a Kafka topic. You will be provided credentials to infiltrate the Kafka topic, containing data describing user information and their related transactions conducted on that website.
Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to intercept the real-time data stream and ingest it into StarTree Cloud. In the fast-moving digital landscape, users navigate between various actions—viewing products, adding items to their cart, checking out, and finally, purchasing. Track these interactions, step by step, and construct a conversion funnel for the E-commerce platform.
This dataset consists of past transactions, so set your data retention to six months to be sure you capture all data. You must then use the StarTree Query Console to generate these insights:
- Conversion Rate Analysis: Determine the overall conversion rate for users on certain devices
- Drop-off Rate Detection: Identify the weak links in the shopping process for various platforms and devices
- Abandoned Cart: Pinpoint which users managed to checkout but mysteriously abandoned before completing their order.
Bonus Mission: Optionally, if you succeed at the first part of this challenge, the Secretary has authorized you to build a dashboard to visualize these insights. Implement dynamic filters for certain dimensions to allow for seamless exploration of the data. You may choose whatever weapon you have in your arsenal to accomplish this.
If you succeed in this challenge, you will be eligible for our top prizes. If you fail, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions. Sign-up here to accept your mission and get all the confidential information.
Helpful resources:
Here is a list of tools that will be helpful in accomplishing your goal, Agent:
- How to ingest data using StarTree Data Manager
- How to create a dataset based on a topic in Confluent Cloud
- Useful function for Funnel analysis in Pinot
- Guidance on how to improve Query Performance
- Slack Channel #startree-mission-impossible
- Office Hours on 10/8 – Sign up here
Why StarTree Cloud
StarTree Cloud, powered by Apache Pinot, is the best platform for real-time analytics powering user-facing applications. Whether you are developing mobile applications or web interfaces, we believe it all starts with our fast, powerful, and scalable real-time analytics platform.
- Also, if this is your first time using StarTree Cloud, you can watch our on-demand webinar: Getting the Most out of StarTree Cloud Free Tier.
- If you’re new to Apache Pinot and want to get up to speed, make sure to watch our whole free course on Apache Pinot 101.
The next step is yours
Agent, the world needs your skills. Are you willing to take up the challenge? If so, the next step is yours.