Between Competitive Programming, talking with my professors, planning my next semester, working on my resume and working on my project I had a very full day.
Competitive Programming
I participated in my first competitive programming event today and had a lot of fun. I was the senior in my team, so I took the lead and helped coach my team through some of the problems. One of the members of my team had very little coding experience, so it was cool to show him the ropes on how to approach some of these problems and to show him some of the common problem patterns you'd run into. He was pretty excited about using Dictionaries to count duplicates so that was fun.
Everybody in the team were familiar with different languages, so I thought it would be best to use Python as it is fairly simple to understand. That seemed to work very well, and I was able to bust out some of the Python-tech that I've learned over the years, namely list comprehension and f-strings.
We placed a little above middle of the pack, but we were happy with how we did and I feel like everyone walked away today better programmers.
In the future, I would like to participate in an even more competitive scenario where you compete for a prize with randomly selected teams. I think that would be really fun.
Today
I made a lot of progress today. I spent more time with React-bootstrap and decided on which components I am going to use in my page. In addition, I modified the CSS layout and fixed some code modularity problems I had with my Flask server.
Tomorrow
I'm going to continue working on my project. I hope I will have some what of a final product to show off tomorrow. Don't be too harsh on the design; I never claimed to be a good designer!
What I'm Struggling on
I'm still finding some trouble on how to use Flexbox in conjunction with Grid. As I understand it, they're both made much more powerful when you use them in conjunction, so I'm trying to force myself to use them together.
Top comments (3)
what did you do in the competitive programming event? was it solving a problem or building something? how does it differ from hackathons?
Competitive Programming, at least here, you get a sort-of-gauntlet of Leetcode problems which get progressively harder. The problems are scored based on how many test cases you're able to pass and how fast your algorithm runs. You're assigned a team and whichever team gets the highest score by the end of the competition is the winner.
It's really fun, even if you don't win!
ah, I'm pretty bad at leetcode and DSA haha