Yes, I have once again put off writing another blog post for 7 months. I'm horrible. Let's catch up, starting with September. It's actually pretty interesting to reconstruct your history like this; I have a vague idea of what happened, but for the details it is quite useful to go through old mails (sent & received) and my GitHub profile.

I had put off applying for a job because obviously writing my thesis was more urgent, after all that had a deadline! For the record: Don't do that. Applications take a while, especially good ones. Even more so if you spend forever on programming challenges which can't possibly be that hard, like I did.

One of the studios I was (and am) interested in is the Paradox Development Studio since they use their own engine and I imagine I'd like low level C++ coding. They have a kattis challenge you need to solve; when I first looked into it in early September you had to solve two out of three challenges. Number one was pretty easy, although getting it to execute fast enough took some thinking.

The time constraints turned out to be the problem for the other challenges as well. I ended up writing an integer linear programming solver for the second challenge - initially in Haskell, then when that was too slow I rewrote it in C++. I still couldn't figure out how to make it fast enough. Same story with the third challenge.

Meanwhile I defended my thesis and got my degree by mid-September. I didn't actually send out any applications prior to that since I wanted to include the degree, but shortly afterwards I applied for an internship at YAGER, which does not require solving any coding challenges first and was thus very straightforward. The month ended before I heard back from them and I did not send out any further applications before October, which my next post will cover.

So that was September, wherein I obsessed over kattis challenges way more than I probably should have.

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