Why competitions compound career capital (the Trophy Funnel / Proof-of-Work Marketing thesis) Platform-specific winning discipline for Kaggle, Zindi, DrivenData, Numerai, WorldQuant BRAIN & IQC, Codeforces, ICPC/ACPC, LeetCode contests, Devpost, MLH, Anthropic/OpenAI LLM hackathons, UmojaHack Africa ML-competition meta: CV design, ensembling, hill climbing, GPU-poor strategies, LLM-era tactics Hackathon meta: scoping, pitch architecture, demo polish, team roles, failure recovery Competitive programming training routine + measurable rating progression (Codeforces Expert / ICPC regional) Quant specialization: WorldQuant BRAIN alpha anatomy, IQC three-stage playbook, Consultant ladder, Numerai staking Career conversion: leaderboard → Consultant → internship → full-time; hackathon → founder credibility; Kaggle Master → FAANG applied research Kenyan-market playbook: UmojaHack, Nairobi Innovation Week, Pajamas and Code, GDG Nairobi, iLabAfrica events Content multiplier: 1 competition → 10+ marketing assets (posts, threads, videos, repos, modules, case studies) Hidden leaderboards: GitHub, arXiv, Product Hunt, HN, Dev.to Prop-firm proof (FTMO/TopStep/MyFundedFX) as a case-study artifact for the ML-trading reader
