Competitive Programming

IOI bronze medal, ICPC World Finals honorable mention, and four seasons representing UW.

For those who don’t know, competitive programming is a sport where programmers compete by solving given problems within a given time (usually 3 to 5 hours). Winners are typically determined by the number of problems solved and the time it takes to solve them. The problems are designed to not only test participant’s knowledge of algorithms and data structures but also their ability to choose the right ones to solve the problems (think interview questions from a tech company but much harder).

In 2022, I represented the University of Washington (UW) with two teammates at the ICPC North America Championship (NAC). We placed 10th and qualified for the ICPC World Finals, where we received an honorable mention in the 2022 contest. One highlight at NAC was being the first team to solve problem A (see the scoreboard).

UW Team: (left to right) Phawin Prongphaophan, Nathanon Akkaraphab, and Milin Kodnongbua, at the competing station.

I represented UW for four ICPC seasons after joining the university in 2018, and later coached its teams from 2023 to 2025. The Allen School News also featured our team after NAC 2020.

Like other sports, competitive programming requires rigorous training. I began competing in high school in Thailand, attending training camps and selection rounds. I was selected as one of Thailand’s four representatives at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) 2018 in Japan.

(Left) The four representatives and coaches; (Right) Milin at the competing station.

I did poorly on the first day. There was an easy problem which more than half of the participants got full points and I couldn’t solve it. I was able to pull it through on the second day and got a bronze medal at the end (see the scoreboard).

Throughout many years of practicing, I curated various data structures and algorithms that are frequently used in the contests in my Github wiki page. This was made for my own reference for some online contests that allow copying-and-pasting from the Internet. I hope it can be helpful for anyone else who is interested in competitive programming.