Why my biggest embarrassment was also one of my greatest learning experiences in Programming!

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The background

This happened almost twenty years ago, in the year 2006, back in my undergraduate days, when I was still studying CSE - I participated in my first and only International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), which was then known as ACM-ICPC.

I was, and still am, one of those programmers who like to take it slow, with full clarity, and try to completely grasp the concepts all by myself before jumping into implementation. As a result, I never was competitive programming contest material!

So then, why did I participate in that contest?

Why my biggest embarrassment was also one of my greatest learning experiences in Programming!

Related reading

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The Day I Became a Bug Hunter

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My Summer of Sleuthing: 373 Merged PRs and the Bugs That Taught Me Everything

Gotcha: chasing a bug that was never in my code

Some Bugs Aren't in Your Code. They're Hidden in Your Dependencies.