For the last few years I've been getting involved in the ICPC at both of my universities (UC Davis and UC San Diego). Since I was born in 1990, the 2013 ACM ICPC is the last regional competition I'll ever be eligible for, and I've decided to give it my all! I've committed to practicing a little bit each week, which honestly fun in it of itself, so why not?

So far I've competed in two contests on CodeForces and one on TopCoder. In CodeForces round 150, division 2, I solved a whopping 1 problem. Why? I made the wrong choice of diving at problem D rather than trying to solve problems B and C, which were considerably easier. Well, oh well.

In 151 division 2, I solved A, B, and D, and timed out on problem C. I went back and coded C more intelligently this morning, and alas — it works! I often know when naive algorithms are the right approach — I just need to pick the appropriate level of naivety in my solution :).

I've decided to keep a TIL file where I slowly acquire wisdom, as well as a code snippets notebook that will allow me to solve more complicated problems that I run into later. Right now, I'm adding a computational geometry section! I also plan on adding things like network flow, string algorithms, and anything else that I actually take the time to code up that merits an entry.

I'm not sure how far I'll ever get with competition programming, but at the end of the day, it's just a fun and worthwhile hobby that I'm excited to get into.