Yesterday was the best day of short 4-month competitive programming journey. I'm very very happy so decided to share it with you guys. I have been grinding from start of January. I won the best non-university participant award (with 7th overall position) back in PROCOM'24 held in Fast Uni, Karachi. After that, I kept on griding and down came yesterday. There were 2 contests, which is usually the case on Saturdays (Super SATURDAYS). Atcoder Beginner Contest 349 and Codeforces Round 939 (Div 2). I was already struck by something bad in atcoder. In the last-to-last ABC, I registered but couldn't participate because my sister got ill all of a sudden and I had to go to hospital, and they gave me -53 for that. So, I had in mind to get back that rating and perform well and alas! I managed to solve 4 problems for the first time in atcoder beginner contest and also got my best ever rank in atcoder beginner contest i.e. 2649th. Then codeforces round started. I was a bit nervous, idk why. Lengthy statements for a and b increased that for me. A was easy but implementation was tricky. I did something dirty and used vec.erase() and stuff but still took me 11 minutes which wasn't that good. Then came problem B. I read the problem and to be honest, I didn't get anything apart from observing that it's the count of double digits in the array. I implemented that but wasted 2 minutes thinking that, no way! problem B in a div. 2 can't be this easy and at last I submitted, and it worked. Then came problem C. it was tricky at first, which is obvious by the number of solves. I even did 2 incorrect submissions. At first, I thought that a square like following is not possible to make:
But during the contest, I got a click of a head and noted that we could construct this backwards, and it worked. Even after a 100 points penalty, I finished 2275th and am very very happy. I have no words to explain the happiness right now.
