Welcome to the Guide to Programming Contests.
Training advice. See a separate article How to get better?.
Read about team strategy for ACM ICPC in a separate article Team strategy.
Information about editors, shells, version control systems and commandline utilities. See a separate article Choosing the right tools.
My name is Lukáš Poláček and I'm currently a PhD student at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden as well as part-time employee of Spotify. I am training local teams for ACM ICPC and also some members of the Swedish IOI team. Before coming to Sweden, I was a member of the National Commitee of Slovak Olympiad in Informatics where I was also training students and organizing contests. I have also organized IPSC since 2005, NCPC since 2011 (I was the head of jury in 2013 and 2014), NWERC 2010-2014 (except 2012) and KTH Challenge since 2011.
As for my achievements, probably the most valuable one is bronze medal from ACM ICPC 2010. The second would be achieving maximum rating 2676 on TopCoder.
I am not a certified ''programming coach'', neither do I have a formal education in psychology and a lot of this advice is based on personal experience and anecdotes. So I expect some of my statements to be wrong. If you think that's the case, send me an e-mail or discuss the issue in the TopCoder Forums.