Since the Asia Regionals site was moved back to Singapore from Manila. Dr. Raffy Saldana, the regional contest director wants to keep the momentum of competitive programming in the Philippines. So Computing Society of the Philippines (CSP) decided to organized an ICPC-style nationwide programming contest. The event was hosted by De La Salle University-Canlubang.

A parallel event to the programming contest is a series of talks sharing best programming practices regarding ACM-stylecompetitive programming. Ateneo de Manila University’s head coach, Dr. Pablo Manalastas shared mentoring stratagies. I was invited to speak about “Best Practices in Computer Programming” together with Topher Rigor. We were both members of The Linden BoyZ who particpated in the 2006 San Antonio World Finals. Below is the slide presentation of my part of the talk:

In the first slides of my presentation, I told the audience that ICPC-style programming contests does not promote good programming practice. I reminisced how we used obscure variable names like z, zz, zzz, , , _____ . And then the rest of the talk was about how to build skills individually and as a team. The talk we delivered was very short and I tried as much as I can to stretch the program by referring to key programming contests events and how we tackled challenges. I felt very much like a retired soldier telling war stories to his grandchildren.