My direction in Competitive Programming

Having carefully-developed a well-tested template for programming contests, I am currently looking for ways and means to improve my speed and accuracy in contests. The latter can only be improved through more experience and faster typing speed. In order to fix my slow typing speed, I have learnt touch-typing - my typing speed has increased from an average of 40+wpm to 75 wpm ever since. My extensive list of programming macros also puts less emphasis on my typing speed.

As for problem-solving speed, I have to admit that the author of "Competitive Programming" is right - use the simplest solution that works. Who cares if it is not the most efficient solution? What matters is the "accepted" status. Hence, I am now working in that direction - to write solutions that just make the cut and are easy to implement. An additional effort that I have made over the past year is to develop a well-documented code library of common data structures and algorithms that I would need to use during contests. This reduces the burden of implementation and lets me focus more on problem-solving, which I am still very weak at.

For now, I will continue to use uhunt to practice problems from the book "Competitive Programming 3" and code-drills to do targeted practice in my weak domains. That's all for now. I will write another post at my next milestone.

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