On January 7th, I wrote a post entitled Facebook Hacker Cup = Resounding Failure (and cross-posted it to Quora). This post, while mostly valid in its arguments and complaints, was written in a time of disappointment and anger: two themes that recurred throughout the painstakingly detailed saga of my (and others’) blunders with the Hacker Cup.

I didn’t expect the distribution that post received. In addition to 60 upvotes on Quora, it’s also been reposted and been the source of news stories around the Internet, including on big sites such as AllFacebook, teamliquid, ycombinator, TopCoder, and all over Twitter.

I was significantly disappointed in how the event had been organized and ran. It was never my intention to stir up any bad publicity; I just wanted to make sure the peoples’ complaints were heard. I know it’s probably a little conceited to think I caused the Cup’s refocus on quality, but I wrote a popular post and the competition significantly improved. I don’t care if I was the reason or not; improvement was all I ever wanted.

On my first post, Facebook engineer David Alves was quick to address the problem and outline what the team planned to do about the poor-quality qualification round. Everything he said they would do, they did—and more. Although there have been a handful of problems in rounds since my first post, they’ve been handled much, much better. Most of the bugs have been fixed, the presence of someone knowledgable for answering questions has improved, and they even ran a test round between rounds to ensure that the next round would run as smooth as possible.

In all, the competition has improved greatly, and I’m sure that future Facebook Hacker Cups will be much better. If you’re still in the running for this one, congratulations! I’ll see you in the next round on Feb. 5th! :)

So here’s to you, Facebook. Thank you for providing a playground for coders and hackers. And when the playground was substandard, thank you for listening to your users and fixing it.