I spent ~41 hours mapping the Library of Lambdas for ICFPc 2025. I had a good time.
This page contains the mostly nontechnical bits regarding my contest experience. More technical bits are available in my repo: https://github.com/uguu-org/icfpc2025
My most significant gripe from last year was Discord, where it just didn't work and I didn't know what I missed out. I signed up for Discord a few months that due to Playdate Squad, so this year I was able to see all the action and drama. I feel like I have gotten a more complete contest experience in seeing fellow contestants scrambling over the same cause, although it mostly didn't help in implementing my solution.
As to what I have implemented -- it's ~1K lines of C++ plus a few scripts, which is less code than last year. But unlike last year where I was somewhat making steady progress across the variety of tasks, this year I was basically pushing against a wall for the whole time because I couldn't get a better approach to work. Still, I greatly prefer the single-task style of this year's contest where I feel like I can dive deep into this one task, without any of the time allocation issues that I have had in some previous years. Instead scheduling problems, my failings this year were entirely due to betting on the wrong approach and not able to improve it further.
I always ended up spending about ~40 hours on ICFP contest even though I never planned it that way, I guess that's just how much energy I have for one weekend. I ranked somewhere above the middle for both lightning and full rounds, which is something I aspire to do every year and I have done it again. I am very happy with how this contest went.
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