NWERC, Baby!

So I've been busy.

I've needed a blog for a while, I think tonight's the night to put the plan into motion. Right now I'm using ruhoh, because it's something I've not used before. It seems pretty cool.

This weekend myself and my friends Stefan Kennedy and Cian Ruane were at NWERC in Linkoeping, Sweden, on the team "cat /dev/urandom >> p1.cpp". We solved 2 problems, and came 74th (out of ~99). It's no first, but we're happy enough! As far as we can tell, we solved the third most problems out of any Irish team at NWERC ever. We also beat the team DCU sent the year before last! Whoo!

Today Gary Conway came in to talk to Redbrick about Competitive Programming. The first step of myself and Cian's plan to get some competitive programming going as part of the society. If we want to do well at NWERC next year, we'd better start practising now!

We found out that some of our competition were in their 5th and 6th years in university, doing Masters degrees. They only came 20-odd places ahead of us, so we reckon in 4 years time we might be comparable <3

Tonight I installed Ubuntu on my laptop, after several weeks of planning but not having time. However, this morning, our sprints ended, and Battleship is complete! As in, I don't have to work on it tonight. I'll see how I feel about working on it more in future, but I don't think I'll have much of an urge...

The semester ends in two weeks. Then it's away to Amsterdam for me. And then my first Christmas in uni. The semester has flown.

I look forward to getting some of my own work done over the break. And then starting on my super cool project for semester 2. I have a few ideas, but we'll see what I end up doing soon enough.

Ádh mór!

Noah