The competition was intense.
A recommendation to everyone participating in programming contests which evaluate the speed of the code: do not use Java.

The nuisances we can ignore in everyday development when favoring a reduction in coding time while sacrificing speed in runtime can not be ignored safely. It is extremely easy to get your code rejected by a "Time Limit Exceeded" error.

Java's performance issues caused my team no end of grief, and hampered our progress throughout most of the competition. Then, after the scoreboards had been frozen, I (who was in charge of writing the algorithms) lost it. So I opened gedit (and closed Eclipse) and a vty running bash, and went into a coding spree.

Unfortunately, that happened near the end of the competition, after unhealthily indulging in optimizing Java code. Well, the same code, in C, no optimization needed, ran successfully. One of the judges stated that the fact that we coded the solution in gedit and debugged with gdb was impressive.

I think I was desperate, didn't want to let my team, college and country down, and panicked. As it usually happens to people when the panic, I went to my happy place: I was, mentally, in my house, coding with no IDE: just gcc, gdb, a text editor, and me. And so it is that we had a successful submission.

I'm sorry to say we had no time to submit the other solutions we'd worked out, which is really sad because we'd have had a better standing.

But this was a fruitful experience in many ways. The most understandable one is, I think, that next year we will pointedly not code in Javaunless limitations in C (or maybe in C++, the team has yet to decide which we are learning) would make the implementation really long and painful, or at least severely error prone.

Fortunately, we have a year to prepare for the competition, which is about thrice the time we had to prepare this time around. Unfortunately, it's possible that one of the members of the team won't be able to compete next year for the happy reason that he's graduating.

If that's the case, we'll have to find a new person worthy of being in the happy, dynamic and ever optimist trio, "New Folder".

Alberto Estrella, Melvin González, thank you for your seriously large supply of patience, and for the laughs. It was, as it usually happens with ITESA graduates, a fun time. You're a great team to work with.

Maybe I'll post some anecdotal accounts of our stay in Cuba later on, but that remains unclear. There will be pictures available in Google Plus and probably in Facebook, too. Those might inspire me.

Well, that's it for this entry.

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