Part 1

My further narration becomes less sequential and consistent than the first part. This is mostly due to the fact that competition rounds themselves are covered in the official blog (not to mention that I haven't followed all of them from start to finish), so I'll focus on the interesting things which were happening between the rounds, after them and sometimes even instead of them :-)

At the end of July TopCoder Studio ran a contest to get some ideas of how to entertain people at the onsites. The voting for the ideas had a very poor interface (I wonder whether there was a single person who has read all the ideas before voting?), but still it allowed to choose four ideas:

TCO11 - is the second (and hopefully not the last) finals I've visited as a blogger. I hope that not everybody here followed the official blog, and thus my story of this trip will be read as an original art work :-)

Day -1. Arrival

I arrived one day earlier than most of the finalists, on Friday evening local time. How does one do this? Long story short, you just don't rely on Barbara's choice, and (when filling travel info) write something like "I like this flight, and I'm in SWISS mileage program, and I absolutely love Zürich". Disclaimer: if everybody uses this hack, it might stop working, so beware.