Its Friday, its June 15, and you guess!! Tomorrow is the Final round of INC 2007. Its my first time to compete in this new team (Me, Dennis, Peter), and the competition will be tough (think of NoMoreAC team who have been together for a while). I am used to compete with the YoiAC team (Me, Felix, Andoko), but sadly the team have to broke up because Felix graduated and move to NUS.

I’m quite confident though, and the only thing I fear of is that I may make some bugs tomorrow and mess the whole thing. I have made countless of silly bugs, and although I learned a lot from those bugs I made and fixed, new bugs still comes up very often in my coding. All I do today is have a really good rest and hope for the best tomorrow, as I made more bugs when I’m sleepy or tired. I really need to be in my best condition tomorrow, it’s my only chance to win.

I’ve done a lot of things in preparation though. I finished the important parts of a couple of books in the last week. The first is "The Practice of Programming". I recommend this book to ALL computer science students, it really shows you how to do good coding. It really matches with my experience, but still, I learn a lot out of it. The second book is "C++ Standard Library Practical Tips", which shows how to use the C++ STL and other standard library (such as <string> and streams) effectively. Some tips in it allows coding of common procedures as short as a single line (such as reading input or printing output). These procedures needs at least 3-4 lines without these tips. Both are great books, and I bought both in Bangalore, India during my last trip.

The last preparation I do is now compiling and printing out my Team notebook. This time, it will be based on our YoiAC World Final 2007’s team notebook. I added a page containing extra tricks I learned recently, especially the C++ Standard Library functions that I think will be useful. This notebook contains common algorithms, cheatsheets of mathematical formulas, and some templates. Although in my experience we don’t use much of the notebook during competition, I prepare my best just in case I need it (this time I don’t have Felix in the team who seems to remember everything).

All set and ready, its now time to pray and try my best. I must remember to take the chocolates before tomorrow’s competition, drink enough, and eat enough during the exhausting 5-hour competition. Wish me luck !!! and also, good luck for all of the teams who will compete tomorrow.

-Andrian Kurniady