It’s popular on Quora to ask questions comparing competitive programming (or competitive programmers) with real-world programming (or real-world programmers). For example:

If you only know competitive programming, could you fake being a real programmer?

But how would someone “only know competitive programming”? At a minimum, competitive programmers have textbook computer science knowledge, just like other university CS graduates. And people don’t call new graduates “fake programmers” just because they have minimal real-world experience.

Here’s my answer to the question.

Why is this post so short? Find the answer, and links to a blog table of contents, at A Summer 2019 Experiment.

A Quora reader is wondering if technical interviewers are looking for a perfect answer (as required by an online judge) or if they’re more interested in conceptual understanding:

What happens in a programming interview if you get the answer wrong but show that you understand the concepts needed to be successful? (answer)

Why is this post so short? Find the answer, and links to a blog table of contents, at A Summer 2019 Experiment.

I worked on a math project for the first half of this year, so I was thinking about the issues posed by this Quora question:

Do I need to be good in math to do competitive programming? (answer)

Programming competitions are not math competitions, so they don’t usually focus on tricky math problems, and they don’t require the same level of math puzzle expertise. But the right math preparation can definitely make things easier.

Why is this post so short? Find the answer, and links to a blog table of contents, at A Summer 2019 Experiment.

Stack Overflow is working on changing their culture to appeal to beginning programmers and new users. Maybe they’ll succeed without driving away the expert users. But even if they do, it will take time. Meanwhile, people will look for alternatives, asking questions like How do I add more complicated questions to Quora similar to the ones on Stack Overflow? (answer)

Everyone has their own history with Stack Overflow and it’s hard to convince someone who had a bad experience that the site is the best place to ask programming questions. Nevertheless, it’s the best place to ask programming questions, as long as those questions fit the Stack Overflow model and you ask them correctly. You could even potentially ask a competitive programming question on Stack Overflow, though that requires extra care.

Why is this post so short? Find the answer, and links to a blog table of contents, at A Summer 2019 Experiment.

Achieving mastery in a skill takes practice. But is practice still useful for people who are already among the best performers in their field?

How does Petr Mitrichev practice for Competitive Programming? (answer)

Why is this post so short? Find the answer, and links to a blog table of contents, at A Summer 2019 Experiment.

If you want to know what competitive programming is, you won’t find the answer in a standard dictionary. Instead, you could look on Wikipedia. It’s not the most hospitable site for competitive programming content, and the main competitive programming article is rudimentary at best. But at least there’s an article, and it hasn’t been deleted (yet).

Alternatively, you could browse the 23 or so answers to the Quora question What is competitive programming? (my answer).

I also wrote a blog post a few years ago that answers the question in a different way: What is Competitive Programming?

Why is this post so short? Find the answer, and links to a blog table of contents, at A Summer 2019 Experiment.

Coding interviews and coding competitions are similar in some ways, but they aren’t interchangeable. For example, they differ in how code is evaluated:

How is the code judged by the companies (during interview) or coding competitions? (answer)

Why is this post so short? Find the answer, and links to a blog table of contents, at A Summer 2019 Experiment.

One of the many complaints that people have about coding interviews is that they are biased towards recent graduates. As the argument goes, recent graduates have just finished studying the algorithm-heavy topics that those interviews favor, so they have an unfair advantage. But the advantage isn’t as strong as one might think, because a typical computer science curriculum isn’t aimed at preparing students for coding interviews or programming contests. Or to put this in the hyperbolic style of Quora questions:

If algorithms are taught in universities, why doesn’t everyone win the ACM-ICPC competition? (answer)

Why is this post so short? Find the answer, and links to a blog table of contents, at A Summer 2019 Experiment.

On June 13, 2012, Quora user Kent Palmer read a post on Cal Newport’s Study Hacks blog, and posted a question: “How do you practice ultra-learning?” It took over seven years, but there’s now a definitive book-length answer to that question, Scott Young’s Ultralearning. I summarized the advice from the book in my answer to the Quora question, and in two blog posts last month:

• Book Review: Ultralearning by Scott Young
• An Ultralearning Approach to Mathematics Practice

Here’s another Quora answer from last week:

Question: Is Cracking the Coding Interview a good read to improve my programming skills for future job interviews and competitive programming? If so, do you have other recommendations like books, projects, websites, etc.? (answer)

Why is this post so short? Find the answer, and links to a blog table of contents, at A Summer 2019 Experiment.