This time it was good enough

My submission that I talked about last week would've placed around 230^th place. (top 500 advance). I didn't let it be though. I worked on it further, and ended up finishing right around 100^th place. The official results aren't finalized yet, so I don't know my exact place.

So was the effort I put in to raise my result worth it, given that I would've advanced either way? Can I consider it good practice for the next round (which starts Wednesday) where only the top 200 advance?

As you might've figured by these last two posts, I am in TopCoder mode at the moment. This seems to happen once or twice a year during tournament time, so you'll have to bear with me. I am justifying it by saying it fits with the theme of my blog because these are programming contests.