THATS RIGHT!!! I DID IT!!! I'm moving onto the state finals! The competition was quite small at my college, but it was very stressful.

The rules were quite simple. You have 2 hours to solve 2 programming problems using whatever frameworks or tools you want. The top 3 contestants would move onto the state finals.

What made this quite an interesting ruleset though, was that initially there was only 3 people (myself included) at the competition. This meant that no matter what, we would've all gone, even if we failed miserably.

Thankfully we had someone else come in, but that made the situation even weirder because if you weren't in the top 3, you were the only one to fail. Being the one person would suck a lot, so it really encouraged me to do my best.

What was it like?

Quite stressful. I don't do well under tight deadlines, especially when it comes to programming. I'm a perfectionist at heart, which makes it very hard to force myself to accept an okay result. This lead to some stressful factors when working on my project.

Primarily, I decided to make a menu system that I could dynamically scale as needed for whatever tasks I was going to work on. This caused quite a lot of problems where I had to repeatedly test and make sure the system didn't break.

On top of that, the tasks we were given were to parse CSV files and sort them (which isn't hard, just annoying) and to make a triangle solver that could check the type of triangle, give the area of the triangle, and make sure it is a possible triangle.

The triangle was the biggest pain in the ass. Math isn't a real strong suit of mine, especially when I have to turn formulas into code. It took a bunch of iterations to get the math right and took a lot more to test since I had to make sure everything works. I haven't had to do any triangle math in a long time, which meant I forgot about all the cases where one side needs to be longer than the sum of two other lengths, or where a triangle exceeds 180 degrees, or making sure nothing was negative.

In the end, I was able to finish both problems within the time limit, and it was a great exercise in programming under deadlines. Coding competitions and game jams are two entirely different beasts. Game Jams are quite fun and force you to learn under pressure while having fun. Coding competitions are just a gauntlet of stress where you try to fix all edge cases in the time allotted. They're stressful but a great exercise for the mind.

Final thoughts

Overall, I had a lot of fun! I'm glad the other students in my CS2 class pushed me to participate in the competition. It was a neat little exercise that forced me to work under different circumstances and pushed me to be better at programming.