Good at Computer Coding and Data Mining, Saeful is Flooded with Prizes

Saeful Ramadhan is one of the students of the Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Bogor Agricultural University (FMIPA IPB) who often won in several competitions. This final year student has a long list of achievements. He often wins competitions especially in programming and data mining competitions. The competition usually offers quite fantastic prizes.

Saeful won the Hackathon competition or built a marathon application held by Tokopedia last September. “At that time me and two of my friends were asked to make an application within 24 hours,” he added.

Although the time was very short, he and the team managed to make an application and had the right to bring home a prize of 30 million rupiah. The application is voice recognition, the application for shopping at Tokopedia, which is specifically for deaf people.

“I started to know the progamming world since the second grade of high school and then started taking part in various competitions. So, competing has become a hobby and prizes are not the main goal, I only consider prizes as a bonus, “Saeful said. At present eleven achievements have been recorded. But before arriving at this point, he had experienced failures. “When I was level one or two, I always lost the competition. But I continued to practice and tried to take part in the competition again,” he said.

Saeful added that all the knowledge he mastered at this time was not all he got from class. He often learns self-taught. As he did before taking part in one of the competitions, he studied independently with his friend for three months diligently.

“We practice on the sidelines of our busy life. At that time we were conducting field practice and returning we always stopped by to study at the IPB library until the library service was closed,” he said.

Their tenacity and hard work paid off. In November, Saeful and the team won the Finhacks Data Challenge, which was held by PT Bank Central Asia Tbk (BCA), and has the right to bring back 10 million rupiah.

In addition to these two wins, there are still 9 other championships that he won. Among them when he participated in GEMASTIK IX at the Sepuluh Nopember Institute of Technology (ITS), Surabaya. Saeful and his team presented a gold medal for IPB. (FM)