We woke up fairly late today because we were quite tired after our long travel day yesterday. Our apartment is very close to a subway station which is a few stops from the National Mall, the big grassy area in front of the Capitol. Our destination for the day was the Holocaust Museum, a tribute to the genocide of the Jews by the Nazi regime before and during WWII.

Today we left for Washington D.C. I drove mom and dad headed to the airport early this morning (like 04:00). Hannah and I stayed in Denver for the morning so that we could attend a friend’s graduation brunch.

Hannah and I ended up leaving for the airport at around 13:00, arriving at around 14:00, and getting through security with no problems. We had nearly two hours before our 16:20 flight. Unfortunately for us, however, the flight was massively delayed. The incoming plane was stuck in Dallas for a few hours, and could not make it to Denver in time. The plane ended up departing at 18:40 (MST).

For the last two years, the Mines Computer Science Department has hosted a High School Programming Competition modelled after the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). The Mines ACM Student Chapter does the vast majority of organization and operations for the competition. As Chair of Mines ACM, I was responsible for a lot of the organizational aspects of the competition.

The competition saw teams from around the Denver metro area, and even as far away as Steamboat, come to compete by solving programming problems. The problems ranged in difficulty from a problem requiring contestants to take two numbers and multiply them together, to a problem where the students were required to implement an algorithm to solve the Minimum Spanning Tree problem.

A couple of weekends ago (Feb. 23-24), nearly 30 Mines students (myself included), attended the HackCU hackathon at CU Boulder.

Since the hackathon was so close and since I was driving up to the hackathon, I decided to bring all of my electronics. I brought my desktop, a monitor, my mechanical keyboard, my ThinkPad, my MacBook Pro, my iPad, a Raspberry Pi, and a variety of other assorted cables and electronics. It was a good thing I did, too, since we ended up using all of them during the hackathon.

Objectively, I’m pretty good at winning prizes at hackathons. I’m not entirely sure how/why, but I am. In this article I intend to try and describe some of the things which have helped me and my teams at hackathons. Please note that these are merely my experiences. Your mileage may vary.

I woke up at 8:00 on Thursday morning. After a quick shower, I went down to eat some breakfast (provided again by Facebook). Then, we got on a bus and went over to Facebook HQ. This is a picture of building 18, one of the smaller buildings on the campus.

This morning I left for a hackathon at Facebook Headquarters. I had to wake up at 3:30 since the flight was at 7:50 and I had to pick up Sam and Jack on my way.

We qualified for the Facebook hackathon at MHacks with our Datanium project. Unfortunately, Robby was unable to make it to the finals since he had too many assignments and projects due this week. So we ended up replacing him with Jack Garner who I had on my HackCU team and on my ICPC team.

Today I competed in the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) Rocky Mountain Regionals at Colorado State University (CSU).

ICPC is the International Collegiate Programming Contest. It’s an algorithmic competition for college students. I’ve competed in ICPC three times now, but today was the best my team has ever done. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Some background on what we did.

Today was the end of our cruise :(

I woke up rather early to go say goodbye to Alex and Eric.

Then we went to eat breakfast. Then we finished packing our bags and then played some ping pong while we waited to disembark. Eventually we just decided to play stupid and just get off because we started to be concerned with getting to the airport on time. It worked, and it was a good thing because once we got off the ship we had to wait in a massive queue at immigration. Still, we made it to the airport with plenty of time.

Today was another day at sea. The seas had calmed down, so the ship wasn’t rocking much at all. I spent a lot of time playing ping-pong, swimming, and playing chess (sound familiar). I played one guy who was really good (at least compared to me) rated ~1500. I’m doing well to stay above 1100.

I also tried to help Alex and Eric become better at chess. Hopefully I taught them OK.