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 […]
ContinueQuora Experiment 2019: Week 8
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 […]
ContinueQuora Experiment 2019: Week 7
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 […]
ContinueQuora Experiment 2019: Week 6
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 […]
ContinueQuora Experiment 2019: Week 5
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.
ContinueQuora Experiment 2019: Week 4
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 […]
ContinueQuora Experiment 2019: Week 3
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 […]
ContinueQuora Experiment 2019: Week 2
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 […]
ContinueQuora Experiment 2019: Week 1
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 […]
ContinueA Summer 2019 Experiment
This is the 26th week of 2019, which means I have published 26 articles this year, mainly about mathematics practice. With the year halfway over, I’m going to try an experiment. Because, besides being the ninth principle of ultralearning, experimentation is a way to avoid sticking with the same process just because it’s the way […]
Continue