Tomas Loksa is ready for a certificate

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tomasloksa     2025-01-23 20:14:07

Hi, I stumbled upon this site way back in high school (2017) when I was just getting into programming. I really liked the challenges and the progress I was making. Often when I learned something new, I was be able to apply it in yet another problem, that I couldn't solve before, and this kept me going. Another thing, that really kept me motivated was competition. At some point, my classmate - Radovan Markus - tried to take my #1 spot in Slovakia (and even managed it, for a while :D).

I shared the site with a lot of people I knew - I counted 13 people I know on the Slovak leaderboard (including all in the top 6). I'm also quite confident to say that this site helped me pass the interview for my first job as a C# developer, right after high school - I continued working there during 5 years of university and I'm still working for the same company today.

As the years went by a lot of things changed, including the programming languages that I used (or wanted to learn), as you can see in my solutions list. But I always came back here, even after longer breaks.

What brought me back this last time was a realization - a web developers job can be mundane sometimes. When you're writing new APIs and business logic, you don't really have to keep figuring out difficult problems. And if I want to keep my logic and problem solving skills, I have to keep training them. During my years at university i had a lot of challenging assignments, but not anymore.

After looking at my profile I realized that I'm really close to the new certificate and I've solved the last few problems that I needed today.

Finally, I would like to say a big thank you to Rodion and other members for creating and maintaining this great website with amazing problems and such a friendly and helpful community.

Rodion (admin)     2025-01-24 14:22:00
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Tomáš, Ahoj!

Thanks for your very curious story! I definitely remember Radovan Marcus and you - though it never occurred to me you are classmates! BTW warmest greetings to Radovan, hopefully he is doing fine too :)

a web developers job can be mundane sometimes

Ha-ha, that's true - and probably it's why this site was created - as I myself often feel bored with my "day-job" too :) And I generally feel "big thanks" to other members, and even more to those who like you keep in touch over years and sometimes come and share about their "professional progress" - it's always quite curious and motivating!

It is also interesting to hear that, as I understand, you seemingly started working very early during your university years? I never could well do studying in university and working in parallel...

Ah, almost forgot - I came to say your certificate is ready! I'm especially glad to see we have one more country represented in our "elite-club" of certificate holders. Please kindly check if everything is written correctly. I just noticed by chance your name is written with "diacritics" in profile info - and tried to copy this accurately :) For a minute or two I thought it is very unusual that Slovak language has same "v" mark over "S" (and "C" probably) as Czech does - but then it occurred to me the languages are significantly related!

tomasloksa     2025-01-24 20:26:08

Ahoj!

I passed your greetings to Radovan, and he really appreciated it.

Yes, I worked the entire time during university, although the first four years were only part-time, and I had a lot of freedom there. When I had a lot of assignments or a difficult exam, I was able to take a few days or weeks off to focus on school.

Thank you once again for the certificate, especially for including the correct diacritics. :) Everything is perfect!

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