Last two weeks have been a blur for me. I kept wanting to blog but I never managed to actually start typing!
College work has increased so much that there is hardly anytime left to do anything else. I am out of the house for almost 12 hours and after that I spent the remaining time finishing my pending work and then I crash!
On top of all this, a few students from my class, including me, decided to participate in a coding competition, ACM ICPC, which is a renowned coding competitions which happens all around the world. We had decided to participate in two online preliminary rounds for two regional level competitions. This was a new thing for me, because I am not so used to writing code in a certain time limit (in these competitions the time limit was 3 hours to solve a max of 5 problems). But despite that fact, I decided to participate in it because I need to learn as many different parts of this field that I have chosen for my career and that would help me develop as a programmer. I am the only girl in my team but that didn’t put me off, because my team is full of really hardworking people, who don’t chit chat and waste their time when there is work on hand!
This competition was hosted on Code Chef, which is a competitive programming site, where you can practice ad develop your coding skills and you can participate in monthly contests to test your skills.
The first competition was on last Saturday and as a team of 4 individuals, sitting at their own terminals and not talking much, we did quite well, we attempted 3 problems out of which 1 was correct, and that wasn’t so bad considering that only one of us was used to such type of codes and all others were new to it!
The second competition was yesterday in the afternoon, and we hoped to do better than the first competition, but for some reason we got the same reasons like the first competition, only our rank improved… which was a bit of a disappointment for me.
Now all we can do is prepare ourselves more for the next year’s competition and hope to get selected for the regionals!
Such type of competitions are really helpful if you want to improve your algorithm building techniques and then code the developed algorithm such that it requires least time to execute and it uses minimum memory!
That’s all for now, but I have to make up for not blogging for so many days, there is a lot I meant to blog about! 😦
The Dramatic Soul 
It sounds like you are having a tough time at college. I’ve noticed my workload has increased in my final year. It’s makes fitting in the things I enjoy doing almost impossible, but sometimes I just have to force myself to take a break.
The coding competition seems like a cool idea, although I can imagine it’s tough. I like coding but I’m not very quick at it. I’ll do a little and then have to go and read a bunch of tutorials on it!
Ahh, college can keep you pretty busy! I’ve only just started last year, and it’s already a huge change of pace from high school. And wow, being out 12 hours a day? You’re my hero, I couldn’t fathom.
I never knew there were such things as coding competitions, but it sounds pretty interesting. Despite not being able to do as great as you’d wanted, I’m glad your team got to were you were. All the luck for next year!
Sometimes, I miss college and being kept busy and never knowing what would be coming next or having all these exciting things going on. Now that you’ve been through the competition once, you’ll have a good idea on what to expect for next year!
1 Pingback