Last weekend I competed in the qualification round of Google Code Jam. I went into it cold (i.e. not having read any of the previous problem sets), and found it a little harder than I expected. The first 2 questions were easy. The last 2 were easy in principle, but I found my implementation didn't scale well to the large data sets, given the limits involved. I still got well over the required score to get me into the next round.
My take-aways from the process are as follows: