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Review: How to Win Coding Competitions by ITMO University

By Duncan Smith Leave a Comment Nov 30 2

Last month, ITMO University launched an edX course called How to Win Coding Competitions: Secrets of Champions. With this first iteration of the course coming to an end, I thought I would discuss my experience with it.

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An Ultralearning Approach to Competitive Programming Practice

By Duncan Smith Leave a Comment Nov 23 0

Scott Young has recently been writing about a concept he calls ultralearning, a philosophy and collection of techniques for quickly gaining mastery of a subject. This week, I’m going to explore how we can use ultralearning techniques for competitive programming practice.

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How Many Problems Do You Need to Solve?

By Duncan Smith Leave a Comment Nov 16 0

Programmers get better at competitive programming mainly by solving competitive programming problems. It’s true that there are other activities that go along with problem-solving practice. Reading about algorithms, data structures, and problem-solving techniques is useful to avoid re-inventing the wheel. And it’s even more important to read solutions after you solve a problem, so you […]

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Review: Awesome Competitive Programming by Jasmine Chen

By Duncan Smith Leave a Comment Nov 9 0

In January of this year, Jasmine Chen (lnishan) published a Codeforces blog post called An awesome list for competitive programming! Since then, she and a few collaborators have been editing and expanding the list on GitHub. Awesome list in this context doesn’t just mean “a really great list.” It refers to a project started by […]

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How Long Should You Spend on a Problem?

By Duncan Smith Leave a Comment Nov 2 0

To get better at programming or math, it’s not enough to read about a topic. You have to solve problems. And solving problems is a lot more beneficial if you have access to solutions, especially ones with detailed explanations. But as useful as solutions are, they also present another problem: when is the best time […]

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Why is Competitive Programming Hard?

By Duncan Smith Leave a Comment Oct 26 0

When I came up with 12 Reasons to Study Competitive Programming, I picked the following for reason #3: Studying competitive programming gives you a way to practice solving hard problems. (As I pointed out in the article, this is also a reason that some people give for not studying competitive programming. They claim that most […]

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Questions About Competitive Programming

By Duncan Smith Leave a Comment Oct 19 0

If you have a question about competitive programming, Quora is a good place to find the answer. Quora’s Competitive Programming topic attracts experienced competitive programmers, and they have written answers to a variety of common questions that beginning and intermediate programmers have about the subject. It has been a few years now since the Quora […]

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Three Perspectives on Coding Interviews

By Duncan Smith Leave a Comment Oct 12 0

It’s October, the time of year when leaves start to fall from the trees, and companies start to recruit college students for summer internships. Last week, I spent half a day interviewing some of those candidates. I also came across a long Hacker News thread called I Hate HackerRank. So I thought it would be […]

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The Benefits of Demystifying Tacit Knowledge

By Duncan Smith Leave a Comment Oct 5 0

Can you learn anything you want by reading a book? A blog post by Scott Young last week got me thinking about claims that some subjects are unteachable. Here are some examples: Claim: Some knowledge and skills can only be learned using an apprenticeship approach. Scott contrasts two learning techniques. One is the standard school […]

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Aggregation of Marginal Gains

By Duncan Smith Leave a Comment Sep 28 0

If you want to get better at something, you need a plan. Improvement doesn’t happen on its own. But once you have that plan, a bigger challenge is executing on it along with your other responsibilities. One way to increase your chances of following through on changes is not to try to make big changes […]

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Getting Started

Are you new here? Check out my review posts for a tour of the archives:

  • 2023 in Review: 50 LeetCode Tips
  • 2022 in Review: Content Bots
  • 2021 in Review: Thoughts on Solving Programming Puzzles
  • Lessons from the 2020 LeetCode Monthly Challenges
  • 2019 in Review
  • Competitive Programming Frequently Asked Questions: 2018 In Review
  • What I Learned Working On Time Tortoise in 2017
  • 2016 in Review
  • 2015 in Review
  • 2015 Summer Review

Archives

Recent Posts

  • Do Coding Bots Mean the End of Coding Interviews? December 31, 2024
  • Another Project for 2024 May 8, 2024
  • Dynamic Programming Wrap-Up May 1, 2024
  • LeetCode 91: Decode Ways April 24, 2024
  • LeetCode 70: Climbing Stairs April 17, 2024
  • LeetCode 221: Maximal Square April 10, 2024
  • Using Dynamic Programming for Maximum Product Subarray April 3, 2024
  • LeetCode 62: Unique Paths March 27, 2024
  • LeetCode 416: Partition Equal Subset Sum March 20, 2024
  • LeetCode 1143: Longest Common Subsequence March 13, 2024
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