Geeky stuff. The New York Times has this article about the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, which I was involved with for several years. The article does a pretty good job of capturing the spirit and intensity of the event. The combined brain power in that one room is staggering; I don't know why more companies don't recruit there. I was on teams competing in the finals, twice (finishing 16th and 5th overall -- "toot! toot!" goes my own horn), and the whole experience has to count as my fondest memory -- the time of my life. If you've ever been a part of a team that was focused and driven with all of their being towards achieving some goal, you know what I'm talking about. You just feel more alive. And I learned sooooo much; almost as much as I did in all my other college classwork put together.

We worked hard, similar to the teams mentioned in the article, drilling for six or seven hours every Saturday, with additional meetings during the week. But it never seemed like work. We did some crazy things in the practice drills. The practice room was made to be intentionally noisy, and bright lights were shone in our teams faces occasionally (like a roving cameraman), because that's what happens in the international competitions. We would occasionally foul up the judging, again, because that's what happens in the international competitions, and we wanted the team members to be prepared for it, and deal with it, and move on. To increase our rigor, we would sometimes have a practice where we were only given an editor, and no compiler, and we had to submit programs without ever compiling them. That was tough. We knew our strengths and weaknesses; teams would get to the point where they could look at a set of contest problems and immediately tell who was going to solve what.

The contest is limited to college students only. Plus, because of the ACM's stupid eligibility requirements, once you've competed nationally twice, you can't compete anymore. So it had to all come to an end. I would love to find something where I could experience that level of intensity again some day.