Welcome to my blog! I go by smax on Codeforces and most other competitive programming sites, and this is a fun personal project for me that I’ve always wanted to do. On this blog, I’ll post articles about techniques, tricks, opinions, or pretty much anything remotely related to CP. Do check it out if you’re interested. This site is powered by Jekyll and the “Mediumish” theme, so if you like how the site looks be sure to check those out.

FAQ

I found your blog but have no idea what competitive programming is. What is it?

Competitive programming (or CP for short) refers to programming competitions where contestants try to solve challenging algorithm problems as quickly as possible. The problems often utilize ingenious applications of traditional algorithms and data structures or deploy slick math/logic tricks, making them very enjoyable to try to come up with solutions for. If you’re thinking of trying it out, just make an account on codeforces.com and try your hand at some problems at this link. The column with numbers (such as 800) refers to the difficulty of the problem, so you can skip forward a few pages any time you’re ready to move to the next difficulty level.

Why not just post blogs on Codeforces? Why make a separate blog?

1. I’m trying to learn web development anyways, so I figured I’d make my first personal web dev project this blog.
2. Not everything I post here will be useful for the general public, and I don’t want to spam on Codeforces forums. Occasionally, if I write some really useful tutorial or something, I might consider making a redirect post on Codeforces.

How often will you post?

Whenever I have a good idea, I’ll try to make a post. In practice it’ll probably be once a month. You can subscribe to the mailing list by scrolling down and filling in the form in the alert so that you get notified whenever I post.

How long will this blog run for?

I plan on keeping this blog alive for as long as I feel motivated, minimum one year after release so that this doesn’t become yet another CP initiative advertised on Codeforces that dies after a few weeks.

What’s your setup?

I use VS Code with some scripts for scraping test cases from online judges and running them.

Do you have an implementation library?

Yes.

I have a question that’s not on here.

Ask in the comments, and I might update this post with it.