My experience with Competitive Programming

As stated by Wikipedia, competitive programming is a mind sport involving participants trying to program according to provided specifications. A programming competition generally involves the host presenting a set of logical or mathematical problems, also known as puzzles or challenges, to the contestants (who can vary in number from tens or even hundreds to several thousand). Contestants are required to write computer programs capable of solving these problems.

After reading this brief intro, let’s dive into my experience with competitive programming. Back in 2021, when I changed my undergraduate course from Aerospace Engineering to Computer Science, I was thrilled about all the opportunities this new field had to offer for me and my career.

At the first moment, I tried a lot, talked to a lot of people and started different activites such as working in a junior company, scientific research and, of course, competitive programming. I crewed up with 3 other friends I made so we could study and participate in competitions togheter. Unfortunately, at the time, we didn’t make progress with the idea. The topics we were studying were way to hard, like dynamic programming and graph algorithms, and, as freshmen, we couldn’t keep up the pace, so I let that opportuniy slide, something I would deeply regret later.

In the beggining of 2024, I was already preparing myself to graduation at the end of the year, and, with the free time during vacation, I decided to give competitive programming another chance. It was hard, as always, but I was more mature now, knew more techniques and algorithms and I was ready to improve my skills and learn more. I also decided to take a specific course at university in the field, which would provide me more tecniques and experience in competitive programming questions.