International Olympiad in Informatics
The International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) is a yearly competition in which students from all around the world test their competitive programming skills. It is one of the most prestigious competitions in the world of competitive programming, and to participate you have to get selected through your country's olympiad process.
In Spain, in order to participate in the IOI you have to win a Gold Medal at the Spanish Olympiad in Informatics. Despite my somewhat lackluster knowledge of algorithms and data structures at the time, I managed to win a Gold Medal in 2019 and got to participate in the IOI as part of the Spanish team.
The 2019 IOI was hosted in Baku, Azerbaijan. The whole event lasted a whole week, and was composed of many experiences and events around the city, where we could meet other participants and mingle. Of course, there also was quite a bit of problem-solving, compressed into two 5-hour sessions hosted at the Baku National Gymnastics Arena.
During the whole week, we were housed in the Athlete's Village, a very large aparment complex completely booked for the IOI.
Although I did not perform very well, primarily due to my aforementioned weak problem-solving skills at the time, it was a very enriching and memorable experience. Even after all these years, I vividly remember certain parts of the experience, such a game of Giant Tetris being played in the hall of the Village, the Japanese team trying to hand out stapleless staplers to every participant, or playing One Night Ultimate Werewolf at the airport at midnight with the Swiss team while waiting to catch our return flight. A great time indeed.
Digital scan of the certificate.
