Having been introduced to competitive programming at the age of 12, I have always liked challenging myself and my friends to solve harder and harder puzzles. I have spent a lot of my high school time participating in different online contests on popular platforms like codeforces.com and atcoder.jp. I wrote my first program ever in Java, but eventually transitioned to C++ as it was more convenient for general competitive programming purposes.
My competitive nature, support from my family and school and talking to new friends who were also actively doing competitive programming has eventually led me to success and a wide range of achievements. I have become very proficient with algorithms and data structures. Math and programming have become as natural to me as speaking a normal language. I have been at IOI (International Olympiad in Informatics), the most prestigious and one of the hardest competitions for high school students ever, twice as a participant in my senior high school years, in 2019 and 2020 and won bronze and silver medals, respectively.
Having individually peaked in my last year of high school, I have successfully graduated with a perfect GPA and was ready to embark on a new journey in university. I have expressed my willingness to participate in ICPC, a much more demanding and serious competition. Going through months of intense training, we have been able to quality to the final stage - The ICPC World Finals in Dhaka in 2022. Although we were not able to win any medals on the Finals itself, our journey to the top has been very long and full of challenges. Not only did we manage to beat a lot of other teams, we were also working fluidly as a team, distributing and discussing tasks efficiently between each other.
After having participated in the World Finals and having mostly achieved everything I ever wanted in competitive programming, I have shifted my focus towards web development. But I still was very active in the competitive programming community and continued participating in ICPC in subsequent years with new teams. We peaked as a top 4 team at SWERC 2022 in Milan, securing a silver medal and topping very strong teams from highly acknowledged universities.
Now I treat competitive programming as a hobby, still solving a few hard puzzles every once in a while. I have been teaching competitive programming classes to newer university teams as well, both improving my teaching skills and keeping my memory of algorithms and data structures fresh.
I have also lately been very active in the problemsetting community. I have come up and prepared a lot of problems by today, which ended up being used at various competitions, including IZhO 2021, 2022, 2023 and a codeforces.com round 673.