Codeforces blogs are really an amazing feature of codeforces and I read multiple of them. I mostly just go through the Recent Actions blogs and sometimes google some blogs on some specific topic. And although the googling part works just fine I don't really understand what is happening with the Recent Actions tab. Here is what I think:

1. Why am I seeing editorials of contests that often happened years ago? What is even the point of having links to editorials on the Recent Actions tab? And one more question is why am I getting contest announcement blogs that are also sometimes years old on my Recent Actions tab? I think of codeforces blogs as something where I can read about things like specific algorithms, strategies, motivation, people's journeys with CP, etc. It's not like when I want to read some interesting blogs that I go and read an editorial for some round that happened a decade ago and I probably didn't even do a single problem from that round.

1. Spam blogs are getting popular lately. There are certainly many blogs written by ChatGPT and many blogs that are simply just spamming with stupid questions or something that was answered before (for example the "How to get red" blog or "How to practice"). Some time ago I came across this blog Here and I agree with the author. There certainly should be some group of moderators that would check the blogs and either accept them or reject them. And if that's not really possible for now I guess there should be way more strict requirements to write your first blog.

What is this blog about

Hello everybody, This is my first blog so it might be a little chaotic but I think it might be interesting. The thing I want to tackle is something between how to practice and the journey of becoming good/high-rated in CP by people who didn't excel in Math.

About Me

So a bit about myself now. I'm a high school student in one of the best high schools in my city and I consider myself to be good (above average) in Maths but I'm nowhere near the level of let's say a Math olympiad or anything like that (nowhere near meaning that maybe with a lot of work I could take part in an olympiad but with my skills now I don't think I would advance to the second stage). I just kinda didn't have to study Math in primary school as it was pretty easy for me and now in high school I'm among the best in maths in my class but again nothing really special and I have to study a lot. This introduction about myself will I think help people understand better what I'm writing about.

Practice Part

When beginners ask for advice on CP or how to practice they get the answer just to solve problems and I 100% agree about that. But the thing is, people who give that advice almost all have a big Math background either Math olympiads or some other competitions in Mathematics. So when these people begin CP what they have to learn is pretty much just the programming part. And after let's say a few months these people are already really high rated. For example, when we look at the graphs of red people we generally see something like this (the graph shows about 3 months):

But the graph of probably 95% of people that are doing CP looks similar to my graph (of course at the beginning of doing CP):

I'm for example most of the time able to solve A and B in div2 and struggle with C but there are times when I struggle for example with either A or B and end up solving only one of them. Of course many people didn't start with Codeforces and used other websites but I think you get my point.

The point of this blog

Although I know that hard work can get you very far I'm also aware that talent + hard work will get you way further. My motivation behind writing this blog is that I wanted to know some of your journeys with CP (mostly people who were just good/above average at math like me) and how you practiced. I often hear that only really smart people (smart probably meaning people with strong Math skills but also people who are just good at finding patterns and not-so-obvious observations) can get to red or a bit higher (2600+).