Hello Codeforces community,

I was planning on writing a blog post about our ICPC regionals experience this year for a while now. The reason is that it is fun to know about various team's experiences, how they prepared etc and also maybe how their thought process was at various times of the competition. Also considering that different regionals have different setups usually (I would argue that Indian regionals do not have more of heavier data structures and relatively more adhoc and math questions), I haven't seen enough posts by teams who have done well on these competitions to give us an idea of what it was like participating in the contest.

An example post of what I am talking about is here. I found it extremely fun to read, and it really felt like a proper regionals experience.

Thus, we decided to make a post on our experiences at the Indian regionals this year and we hope you will like it :)

I plan to cover some good problem ideas and how we approached them, our strategy at various times during the contests, and even what we did to relax (this is an informal blog, so there will be somethings off-topic for those just wishing to learn through these. Please feel free to skip through them). The first part can be found here. While right now I have only written about pre-regionals stages, I will write about the regionals stages soon. Please let me know about any feedback that you have, either in the comments or through PM!