Hello Codeforces!
Over the weekend I attended the British Informatics Olympiad final. Today I'd like to share some thoughts on how it was, and my CP journey going forward.
I started programming in general when I was 12; I learned JavaScript from an old book that was lying around in my house and wrote some small websites — as a lot do when starting out — and generally dabbled in whatever interested me.
Through the COVID lockdown I played multiplayer video games with some school friends such as Minecraft, and played various JRPGs with my sister such as Tales of Symphonia. I took a hiatus from programming but towards the end of the lockdown and as in-person school began to start, I decided to pick it back up again.
In April of 2021, I signed up to user:https://www.codewars.com/users/myst-6. I wouldn't describe this website as a competitive programming — problems feel less math-y and (usually) don't require complex algorithms but instead focus on implementation skills and knowledge language features. A personal favourite of mine is https://www.codewars.com/kata/59b4cf87bf10a4cf59000060!
I began with the easier problems, and on my way to climbing the ranks I learned some basic algorithms like Dijkstra's and A*, and some simple DP like knapsacks. I hit the second-highest rank, 1 dan, just before my 16th birthday.
When I first discovered the British Informatics Olympiad (BIO) at the start of 2022 when it was advertised by a newly-hired computer science teacher at my school, I tried some past papers and was surprised by my relatively consistent high scores. I decided to go straight for it, not knowing much about CP.
Luckily, the second question was an implementation-heavy problem similar to many Codewars questions I had done before, and I scored highly on it! I ended up right on the lower end of the score threshold and was invited to the finals. I was overjoyed, yet did not expect much; when I attempted the past questions on the website, I could barely solve any of them and didn't know where to find resources. In the email invitation, we were suggested to use the [https://usaco.training/](USACO training gateway)
