Algorithm contests? Competitive programming?

Feb. 24, 2016

 Algorithm contests are great tools to use. It takes more critical thinking, and more attention to detail in order to gain points. Julia did two easy questions on two hackerRank contests last weekend, she could not perform on easy question in 20 minutes each. She actually spent over 60 minutes, hard to concentrate, felt stressed. So, she did some research and look into articles talking about programming contests and how she can improve in short time: 

 3 popular contests sites:
 1. HackerRank
 2. TopCoder 
 3. CodeJam

Her favorite article detailed on this - Preparing for a technical interview with programming contests:
https://www.facebook.com/notes/10151298476823920

• You’ll learn how to critically analyze your work. Because you don’t get credit for solving a problem until the code you write can generate the correct results for a large input set (and you don’t know what that input set looks like), you’re forced to think about things such as time complexity, memory usage, and nasty corner cases. Importantly, most of this work happens outside the context of a debugger. Debuggers are invaluable tools for figuring out why a given piece of code is buggy, but it’s better if you can write bug-free code in the first place. In an interview situation, candidates who can’t statically analyze their code generally have trouble showing their solution is correct (or figuring out why it’s not).

https://medium.com/@dpup/whiteboarding-4df873dbba2e#.ps92c99lb
https://code.google.com/codejam/contests.html
https://code.google.com/codejam/contest/6224486/dashboard#s=a&a=0 
http://blog.hackerrank.com/3-ways-crush-technical-interview/
https://www.quora.com/How-has-competitive-programming-helped-you-get-a-job
http://www.redgreencode.com/12-reasons-to-study-competitive-programming/
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-strategy-to-improve-my-skills-in-competitive-programming-in-2-3-months

https://www.quora.com/How-did-Anudeep-Nekkanti-become-so-good-at-competitive-programming

Things to do in next month:
Work on contests every week, 2 - 4 hours. Try to aim for 20 hours experience first.