This past weekend, I had the opportunity to participate for the first time in an online programming contest. The event itself was open for 5 hours, and we were given twelve problems to solve. My team chose to solve most of the problems in Python, which turned out to give us one of Python’s classical downfalls – Even with the ease of implementing the algorithms in Python, most of them ran far too slowly. We were given anywhere from 1-10 seconds for our scripts to execute, and on some of the larger sample sizes our scripts did not perform fast enough to fit in the relatively short allowance for runtime. I did, however, take away some valuable insight into the Python runtime. Python is very much my favorite language to work in, and I’ve begun to do some research into the efficiency and optimization of a reverse factorial algorithm in Python. More on that later.