Hi, I'm Emre from Turkey junior team. As you know, less time left for EJOI 2019, and as Turkey team we're working hard nowadays. You can share your tips with us for help us to improve ourselves. Maybe that will be usefull for you, too. I hope that will be great sharing. I would be grateful if you help.
I'm not sure about how good is my English, but I'm sure about it is not perfect :)
The best thing to do first, in my opinion, is to try to solve all previous EJOI problems, which are not many. Also, you can solve the JBOI tasks as they should probably be quite similar to the EJOI ones. Here is a link in a macedonian judge. Codeforces is a good practice in general so participate in the upcoming rounds as much as you can. If you don't know an idea, algorithm or data structure from these contests, try to learn it.
Thank you for your advice. I agree with you about solving previous problems.
Learn using Linux. IOI and EJOI only feature this OS
Last 2 years I was using windows at EJOI. Did something change in the rules?
Thank you for your comment! We know using Linux (especially Ubuntu) because we can't use another operating system on team camps.
Is there anything drastic between the two OS that one would need to learn beforehand ?
Not a lot, but it's better learn.
what do you mean not a lot ? I don't get it. I've been on Ubuntu for a short period of time and its not like Ubuntu is in Klingon, I don't think you understood my question. Is there something in Ubuntu that a person needs to learn in order to compete in programming, that just doesn't exist in Windows ? I was able to compile and run things in Ubuntu just as fine as in Windows.
I think there isn't. Ubuntu is more useful than Windows for programming because it is faster and simpler. There are some little differences. Ubuntu also contains gcc compiler directly, that means you don't have to install it like Windows. If your code takes runtime error, Windows doesn't show this, you may not understand but Ubuntu shows this directly and debugging can be easier. But if you are experienced about coding already, these things don't affect you, for me.
one of the best features of linux is that it suports some really smart "sanitization".
We all hate when the code runs just fine on our machine but on the judge's system we get RTE / WA.
By adding to the compile line
-fsanitize=address,undefined,signed-integer-overflow(check this), the code will automatically crash locally if we encounter some undefined situation (like bad initialization, integer overflow or accessing nonexistent memory location)