Your plan to work through past Google Code Jam problems sounds great. I'm sure that process would help build your intuition for what tools are actually helpful

Your plan to work through past Google Code Jam problems sounds great. I'm sure that process would help build your intuition for what tools are actually helpful when working on this specific type of problem, which would probably have implications for lots of programs. Personally, I think this type of first-person empiricism is a highly undervalued resource. Also, I wish there were more research labs that could support folks in UIs for programming like this. Right now there are only a couple and a lot of independent people dabbling. As for my work, you can see it at http://glench.com http://glench.com