What I learned at UKIEPC 2018 — University of Southampton

Yesterday I participated in UKIEPC (a subregional contest to select teams that should go to ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest) with my team of 3 hackers. Our code names were Elliot, Angela, and Mr Robot; and the team name—you guessed it— was `fsociety`.

We weren’t allowed to use internet or any digital devices so I printed ~90 pages of “cheatsheets” about Java, C++, algorithms, maths, and competitive programming in general. My teammates brought 2 heavy books on algorithmics.

And the key points are:

• It was more fun that I expected — The problems were neither boring nor overwhelming, but challenging.
• Pratice matters — This is obvious, software development is quite a different beast from competitive programming.
• You need maths — Having gone more in-depth into backpropagation (Machine Learning) and playing with integrals lately, every problem looked like a nail to my calculus hammer. Unfortunately, this hammer wasn’t good enough this time.
• Pick the language you’re most knowledgeable in—Java is far from being my favourite, but because I know well how it works (and the standard libraries), I had an advantage.
• Develop a template—No matter what language, create a template beforehand; when the contest starts, write it once and reuse it for all your problems. It’s also a good idea to include utilities you’re sure you’ll need, but this comes with experience.
• Follow the advice—We were told to solve the easiest problems first, read them in parallel between team members, and to not waste time.

We were 2nd on our University’s leaderboard and somewhere at the end of top 50 across all universities in the UK & Ireland.

Fun? Yes.

Would I do it again? Yes.

Am I going to miss this after I graduate? Ughhhh, maybe!