Here's me, my best friend from college, and the best programmer I've ever met, all at the 1998 world finals ACM programming contest in Atlanta, Georgia. Notice the other two are coding while I am hogging the camera. They were definitely the powerhouse of the team.
The thing I remember about that contest was the side competition with IBM's Visual Age for Java, where noone in 150 of the world's best programmers could actually complete the task of building a simple GUI calculator with the provided code. The idea was to get the calculator running and then provide the best set of added features; they had to grant an hour or two extension to get anyone to get a basic calculator going AT ALL. Turns out it only required three actions to link the provided java beans together.
The main competition was fun, but despite doing very well at the local and regional level, we were not in the groove that day. Every submission we made failed to pass the secret test cases.
