[curiouscoding]

Yeah exactly, pseudocode just doesn't cut it if what matters is exactly the implementation itself.

Indeed I did a bunch of competitive programming! But actually there my favourite topics are combinatorics, graph theory, and number theory. I'd usually leave the datastructure (read segtree) problems to my teammates.

I super enjoyed that, and indeed was looking for a PhD where I could do similar things (because my time at Google was boring in comparison -- mostly just software engineering), on the intersection of new theory and practical fast code. I decided on bioinformatics, because this is exactly a field that has a lot of data, and the amount of data is growing fast, so that fast algorithms&code are needed, both in theory (big-O) and practice. Generally I've been super excited working on various problems in this domain, and I'd say it quite closely matches my compprog experience :)