Recently, I retired from competitive programming completely, and I found myself wondering about what I'll do with all the competitive-programming-specific knowledge I have gained over the years. For quite some time, I've been thinking of giving back to the community by writing about some obscure topics that not a lot of people know about but are super interesting. However, every time I ended up with ideas that are either too obscure to be feasibly used in a competitive programming problem, too technical to ever be seen in a contest, or having too many good blogs/articles about them anyway.
So here's my question: do you think there are topics/ideas that you find are interesting and beautiful, but are not appreciated enough to have their own blogs? If I am familiar with those ideas, I can consider writing something on them (and irrespective of that, I would encourage you to write a blog on such ideas if you're familiar with them). If I don't know about them, it'll be a good way for me and everyone else visiting this blog to learn about it (and if I like the topic, who knows I might as well write something on it too). Also, it's not like the ideas have to necessarily be related to algorithms and data structures, some meta stuff like this nice blog works too.
For an idea about the kinds of blogs I'm talking about, you could refer to my previous educational blogs. I was mainly inspired by adamant's and errorgorn's blogs, since they tend to be really interesting (I would recommend checking them out!).
Maybe you should write a diary? Like, what you have collected year after years, then post it online. Surely it will be a nice story to read.
I know somebody did the same thing and grant him famous. Things die out if later generations don't know them, if you want to spread something, don't worry about they being underrated.
That sounds like a great idea. However, I don't keep any record of what I have collected. For interesting stuff I've read, I pretty much either use it for problem-setting, problem-solving, or just bookmark it in my browser. Maybe it'll be worth digging into my bookmarks for that.
I would appreciate the blog about interesting task you have solved over the year, as far as i know you, you have solved interesting task on various websites, you can share the list or subset of it.
just like morass blog.
I'll have to go through my solved problems for this. Since there are a lot of such problems (running into thousands), I don't think I'll be able to do anything more than briefly skim through them. Some of the more memorable tasks I've solved were during testing contests, since you get a lot more time to solve harder problems and you can discuss stuff in depth, so perhaps that could be a good blog idea.
I'm not sure this would be interesting for you to write about, but one thing that I think would be cool (at least for lower rated ppl like me) is talking a little about mental models or reasoning about topics geometrically. A lot of the math and logic as written in blogs is great for understanding what is literally happening, but doesn't offer much in terms of developing a mental model to actually use that information. Blogs that offer informal ways of understanding topics closer to how you actually reason about problems in a contest for example, would be super cool imo
I think I've been way too out of touch with how a newbie (not in the codeforces sense) thinks to write about something like that. I used to think about this stuff when I was doing math olympiads, and had written some handouts about solving geometry problems specifically, but I think I've internalized a lot of the thought processes I have to an extent where it's not possible for me to motivate it naturally without just saying "do you remember this problem that I solved in the past?". Still, I think there are a lot of amazing blogs on that topic. This is a blog that I enjoyed reading that also talked about such ideas. Similarly, there's Pranav Sriram's Olympiad Combinatorics book that took such an approach. Even on codeforces, there are some nice blogs in the catalog that do the same.
While this is not directly related to CP, I have seen you top many problems for fastest runtime on yosupo library checker. I would definitely read a blog about how you managed to get such speed ups.
Thanks for reminding me of this. I had been planning on writing about this for about a year now, never actually got to writing it.
i hope you become one of the Top contributors by posting that blog. maybe it's your wish too :)
A blog about random walks (probability). I once stumbled upon a random walk question, but I couldn't find much blogs/resources related to it.
Nice pun. I think you can learn a lot about random walks just by studying a bit about discrete time Markov chains, recurrences and martingales. I'll keep this topic in mind though!
maybe some tutorials related to heuristic type of problems?
btw why have you decided to retire from competitive programming?
1) You have found a job that is super demanding & has poor WLB.
2) You think you have plateaued and will never become Red.
3) You have just totally lost interest in it & doesn't feel like doing it anymore.
Or is it something else. Genuinely curious...
I merely moved on from participating in competitive programming contests, the same way people move on from other kinds of hobbies. I don't think 1) is true; I'm happy with the kind of problem-solving that my job entails, and the WLB is good. 2) doesn't really matter for me, I'm okay with not being red. It boils down to how much work you're willing to put into improving yourself at competitive programming and I don't have any motivation to do so.
Hey man I've been going through your blogs lately and these blogs are definitely one of the best blogs I ever came through. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. Keep them coming. PS: Why not start a Youtube channel .