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You: – fairly average software dev – claims not to be competitive, but secretly dreams of landing on the leaderboard at least once – uses a full IDE; wastes a minute right out the gate waiting for it to start – still parsing the problem statement while others are already submitting answers actually uses a debugger when things aren’t working Your competition: "Hackerman" – IntoSec maior – sits at his PC on a near-lethal dose of Adderall waiting for the timer to hit 00:00 – has automated scripts for pulling the input and submitting solutions, and his own library of helper functions for every imaginable problem class – knows vour IP at all times "-mhtwalters" – research scientist at Intel – does puzzles for fun that are harder than any job you will ever have – so utterly bored with the problems that he creates increasingly ridiculous self-imposed restrictions to keep things interesting – solved last year exclusively in APL on a System360 emulator, and still finished 9th on the global leaderboard – personal homepage is HTML 2.0 compliant "wihbr" – software dev from undisclosed Eastern- European country, making 200kyr for a company you’ve never heard of – is in literally every coding competition -Twitch stream is just a Vim terminal and the sounds of a mechanical keyboard – types faster than you can read or think "Tharg" – Linux kernel hacker – specialization in compiler design – is golfing in some esoteric language nobody has ever heard of – can mentally transpile any code he sees to assembly – measures his solutions performance in actual clock cycles – overworked Chinese university student, double majoring in theoretical physics and chemical engineering – has been locked into various educational institutions since he was 3 years old – only time outside of school is for piano lessons – can literally only see the relevant parts of the problem statement – you will not understand his solutions without a PhD in discrete mathematics "Samir Nagheenanajar" – outsourced IT support technician – does puzzles because he has nothing better to do during – forced to solve in Excel because he isn’t allowed to install other software – can reveal the face of God using only BA – rumored to possess the combined knowledge and power of all Indian educational YouTubers