I recently broke both of my hands, which forced me to type rather slowly, so I've had to come up with some strategies to optimize my contest performance and so on. To be honest, it wasn't that bad (and it's less noticeable the longer a contest is, as implementation speed becomes less relevant. For example, I got 11th place on a 5 hour individual contest at the Brazilian ICPC Summer School a week ago) but I'm still very happy to announce that they removed both my casts today and I'm finally back to "properly" coding using both hands.

I say "properly" in quotes because I'm not really back to 100% yet, as months of immobilization caused my muscles and ligaments to slightly atrophy, which causes some stiffness and pain when I move the affected joints. This is apparently easily solved by a month of rehab :^).

Also, because of the way the bone came back together, the index finger on my right hand is now slightly rotated towards my middle finger, which makes my index finger kinda bad for typing. This can be solved by further surgery or, apparently, by just twisting it into the proper alignment over the course of a year, which will slowly reform the bone into its proper shape. (I should be able to consciously keep it in proper alignment using my hand muscles after rehab, so it should be fine for practical purposes much sooner)

My rating will probably tank but I'm doing the upcoming div2 nonetheless (see you there!). After all, we have the ICPC LATAM super regional coming up in march, So I can't afford to stop training right now.

Finally I want to show some pictures of what the casts look like, the scars from the surgery (which I only had on my right hand), and a right hand x-ray I got today.

See you on the next round!

Cheers

UPDATE: rehab is progressing smoothly — I reached master for the first time in the last contest :^)