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Earlier this year Ralf Kistner, double winner of the Gold Medal in the South African Programming Olympiad (2005 and 2006), led a team from his start-up company to success in Paris in the Google Hash Code 2016 Competition winning third place worldwide against 51 other teams from 22 countries.
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In addition to his early national achievements in the South African Programming Olympiad, Ralf earned a silver medal in the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) in Mexico in 2006 as well as a bronze medal in the following year in Croatia. While studying engineering at the University of Stellenbosch he participated in other competitive events, e.g. the Standard Bank IT Challenge, and the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC).
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After his studies Ralf co-founded the company JourneyApps.com in Stellenbosch where he is currently Chief Technology Officer (CTO). The company works from a cloud-based platform to enable their customers build enterprise mobile apps. With a slogan “build, test and launch your business app today” the company’s work includes apps for the South African branchless banking solutions company Tyme, which “needed a tablet app that let its roaming agents open up bank accounts on-the-go, without any paperwork”. (Ventureburn.com Jacques Coetzee 28 March, 2014)
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This year, ten years after his silver medal at the IOI in Mexico he led his ‘gang’ (‘Die Bergbokbende’ lit. ‘The Mountain Goat Gang’) from JourneyApps to another international achievement. On 19 March in Paris at the Google Hash Code 2016 Competition, the Bergbokbende jumped to success in a time-restricted contest from a field that started with 17 000 hopefuls.
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“Contestants were given a real-world engineering problem faced by Google themselves. In the final challenge teams only had 12 hours to think of a truly out-of-this-world solution for Google’s Terra Bella imaging satellite fleet, using any coding language of their choice.
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The problem was built on the challenges the Google company faces in using its constellation of imaging satellites to monitor physical changes on Earth’s surface. The constant monitoring goal needed to be optimized for the largest number of photographs of the maximum number of locations possible given a limited time window and number of orbits.”
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At the South African Computer Olympiad we are proud of the national and international achievements of past winners of the Programming Olympiad. As a learner at Paul Roos Gymnasium, Ralf was also a regular participant in Mathematics Olympiads (in 2004 in Tunisia at the Pan-African Maths Olympiad, and in 2005 in Mexico at the International Maths Olympiad). At the time he listed his hobbies as climbing, programming and maths. From his team’s recent victory in Paris it seems he is still as agile as ever.
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Source: https://journeyapps.com/blog/general/2016/04/04/journeyapps-ralf-kistner-dominates-google-hash-code-2016/
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2006: Ralf Kistner winner of the Standard Bank Trophy for the South African Computer Olympiad for the second year in a row
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2016: Ralf Kistner (second from right) led the ‘Bergbokbende’ team from JourneyApps to third place in Google’s Hash Code Award Ceremony in Paris
