That one moment changed me.

I had lost it. Yes, I had lost the peace in me when I went to Noida for representing my school which is in another not so great city. It was my second time when I would do that for my school. Last time I went to another famous city in my state but I’ve never been outside my state and this was the chance. Although I had lost in the previous competition I wasn’t giving a single penny and was packed with confidence.

So the competition was about Competitive Programming in Python/C++. It was a team event. So I had to choose a partner and so I did to find the best programmer available in the whole school. I got the guy but now the real hard part was about what would come. I had started learning Python last week only so I had plenty experience but neither of us were familiar with competitive programming. So we just searched random programs and tried to recreate them in Python. They were simple yet, confusing programs. I don’t know how but I got this very site called HackerRank on Google while searching and it said Perfect your Competitive Programming.

Me and my partner, started solving questions on the website. First few of them were pretty easy as usual but as we moved forward we encountered harder ones. After a while I was asking some tips from my Computer Teacher and he said that I should practice more and more on programs. I showed him one of the problems on the website and he did it for us as we were unable to do. However he didn’t feel satisfied and advised us to avoid the website as it was too confusing for us. He asked us to solve questions from Book and learn to make patterns, etc.

It was the biggest mistake of the moment.

HackerRank is a very reputed website providing 1000+ questions every hour to practice and take your programming game to an expert level. I don’t know why I skipped it but all I know is that it was one of the biggest mistakes of my life.

When the competition day turns out. We were in a pretty good mood to crush everybody’s programming game as if we were the best programmers. I and my partner were happy about the programs we have practised and the patterns he’d learnt. Soon we were taken to the labs and were asked to seat down and were handed a sheet containing 7 problems. Now to our surprise the questions were those which we had done on HackerRank and at that particular moment I felt like an idiot. We ended up winning nothing but solving 2 questions out of the 7 life taking clots of ink. The team which got the first prize solved 6 questions.

I felt guilty at that very moment because my family’s, school’s, friend’s everyone was hoping that I would win and bring them the piece of yellow shining metal but I got them nothing but a bill of my 200 Rupees Ice Cream Soda. I was the one they hoped would do it and I ruined their expectations.

Now that incident quite changed the “me”. I am now practising questions everyday on HackerRank. Still while I am writing this, it’s 1:32 AM and too late to keep awake.

What I learnt from this incidents are two things:-

  1. Never skip anything especially in Programming and Maths.
  2. Never bring too much confidence inside you as it may burst.

Thanks for Reading,

Give a thumbs up if you like reading this.

Utkarsh Dubey @pr0n00b

I am a full-stack web developer working on creating opensource technology to create a better future. CEO at Shimasu. Caffeine addict.

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