My First Experience at the Ada Byron Contest

My first experience at the Ada Byron contest was one of those things that happened almost by chance. Two friends and I found out about it only about a week and a half before the competition, and even though we had not practiced anything at all, we decided to sign up anyway. We were not prepared, and honestly we went there with the mindset of seeing what it was all about and trying to have a good time.

At the beginning, I think we all had the same feeling: we were probably going to struggle, but it still seemed worth trying. We had not trained, we did not really know the format well, and we were entering a world that was basically new to us. Still, there was something fun about doing it together. It felt like one of those plans that could go terribly wrong or become a great story afterwards.

At least to familiarize ourselves a little, in the days before the contest we tried solving a couple of problems from Acepta el Reto, and even those already felt pretty difficult. That was really our first contact with competitive programming, and I think that is one of the reasons the experience was so interesting. It was a very different way of thinking from what we were used to: less about building a project over time, and more about understanding a problem quickly, finding the right approach, and writing something that works under pressure.

We also spent quite a lot of time preparing a dossier with typical algorithms, notes, and ideas that we thought might help us during the contest. Looking back, we probably focused too much on that part. In the end, the only things that really helped us from that dossier were some templates and having input and output patterns a bit more organized in our heads. Even so, that preparation was useful in its own way, because it helped us realize what actually matters and what does not when you are facing this kind of contest for the first time.

In the end, it actually went much better than we expected. We did not get an amazing score, but finishing around the top 22 out of more than sixty teams felt honestly pretty good considering how little preparation we had. More than that, we laughed a lot, enjoyed the atmosphere, and had a genuinely good time throughout the contest. Even when we got stuck, it never felt like a bad experience. It felt like the kind of challenge that makes you want to keep going.

What I like most when I look back on that day is that it was not only fun, it also opened a door for us. Before the contest, competitive programming was something we barely knew anything about. After it, it became something that genuinely caught our interest. That was probably the biggest surprise. We went in almost just for the experience, and we came out wanting to learn more about this world, how people prepare for it, and how to think better in this kind of problem-solving environment.

That is why I know we want to come back next year, this time much better prepared. Now that we know what the contest feels like, I think we can enjoy it even more and also do much better. But even if our first time was far from perfect, I am really glad we went. It was fun, we laughed a lot, and it gave us a new interest that none of us expected to find just a week and a half earlier.