I don't agree that being a professional programmer for many years can help you be a better coder at a programming contest. I think that the only way of being good at programming contests is practicing and participating in contests. For those who know TopCoder, last year I solved a lot of problems out of contests (TopCoder problems, ICPC problems, UVa problems, SPOJ problems, etc) and trained a lot with my ICPC team and I reached 2020 rating, this year I didn't practice too much and now I'm below 1700, and I'm sure that the main reason of that is my training. If you want to be good at programing contests you must train a lot, it doesn't matter if you work at a good company coding the whole day or if you study computer sciences and you finish your degree. It's all about training. And of course, sometimes it's good to have a good coach to train you, but if you don't have it it's not a big problem if you have this mailing list where there are many people (including me) who is willing to help you with your training.
And there's something more I want to say for people who are new to programing contests: There are many sources of problems where you can practice at, but my favorite one is TopCoder, and I strongly recomend you to download the TopCoder Arena (http://www.topcoder.com/tc it's the O(n) that's in the upper left corner), create an account at TopCoder ( https://www.topcoder.com/reg/ select only the I want to compete on TopCoder option and then complete all the information, don't worry you can trust TopCoder your personal information such as adress or T-shirt size) and log into the Arena with your TopCoder account. Then go to Practice Rooms -> SRMs and you have a lot of SRMs to choose. Go to all the DIV 2 SRMs you can and try to solve the easy problem (it's usually 250, and it's sometimes 200 or 300, but it's always the problem with the lowest number). Try to solve all the DIV 2 - Easy problems you can (where it says "select one" you select the problem by choosing it's number) and after you solve it you go to Practice Options -> Run System Test. That way you'll see if the problem was correctly solved, if your solution fails you can try it again until you solve it. This way you'll start improving your skills in solving problems and one of that skills is related with speed, because you'll find the solutions faster, and once you find them you'll code them faster. If anyone has troubles registering at TopCoder or trying to use the Arena please let me know and I'll try to help you. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "google-codejam" group. To post to this group, send email to google-code@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to google-code+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-code?hl=en.
