Why not do both? I think both activities require complementary skills. In one hand, programming competitions will hone your problem solving skills, ability to

Why not do both? I think both activities require complementary skills. In one hand, programming competitions will hone your problem solving skills, ability to write bug-free code quickly while powering up your language and algorithms skills. In the other hand, developing software and contributing to open-source needs a different set of skills: patience, communication, collaboration and so on.