[globba22]

Like a few other commenters have mentioned, I had a great time trying to work through these problems having seen them in ads on the Red Line in the mid to late 2000s.

For me, these puzzles were what got me to change careers; at that point I was in a non-technical job and didn't have any CS training. Still, I saw these puzzles and was hooked. Figuring out how to even set up a basic coding environment was part of the puzzle for me.

I spent a few weeks on "Strawberry Fields", eventually getting to a brute force solution that passed all the tests. I was about to send it in, and happened to meet one of the ITA folks at a social event. After a few minutes of talking to this gentleman, I realized he was in a completely different intellectual class from me, and that I had to do a lot better than hacking together a solution to a single optimization problem if I really wanted to work in this industry.

I persisted. I kept solving whatever coding problems I could find and rung by rung, climbed my way into some interesting and challenging software and data roles. I bombed plenty of whiteboard interviews along the way.

It sounds funny to write down, but it is not an understatement to say that those ads on the T changed my life!