On Saturday, September 27, I participated in my first ever programming competition: the IronC0d3r Coding Competition, which was hosted by Cardlytics and took place at Georgia Tech. The atmosphere was great, there was a LOT of food, and some of my friends were even there! The competition was scheduled for 3 hours with 10 problems to solve. Each problem was 10 points, which are earned by submitting an output text file based on the input text file that was given. A percentage of the points are given proportional to how close the output was to the correct answers. Unfortunately, there were a lot of issues with the website and the input files, making us all lose quite a bit of time. I even lost 30 minutes in the beginning due to some weird error I was receiving and couldn’t fix for a while. However, I pushed forward and was able to answer 6 of the 10 problems, earning 58.10 points, putting me in 9th place overall out of a total of 34 students who submitted solutions! If I had about 15 more minutes, I am confident that I could have earned another 15-20 points and been in the top 5. Either way, I’m very proud of myself for at least making top 10 in my first competition and I hope to improve on my pacing in future competitions!
If any interested reader wants to see what the problems were like, I posted the code to GitHub!